Dr. Katja M. Gist, DO, MSc, FAHA
Katja M. Gist, DO, MSc, FAHA, is a Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. She is a nationally and internationally recognized physician-scientist whose research focuses on acute kidney injury (AKI) in critically ill children, with particular expertise in cardiac surgery-associated AKI (CS-AKI), continuous renal replacement therapy (CRRT), AKI biomarkers, and clinical trial design for kidney-protective interventions in pediatric populations.
Dr. Gist is the founder and principal investigator of the Worldwide Exploration of Renal Replacement Outcomes Collaborative in Kidney Disease (WE-ROCK), the largest international pediatric CRRT registry, encompassing over 1,000 patients across 35 centers in 9 countries. Through WE-ROCK, her team has produced landmark studies demonstrating that delayed CRRT initiation is associated with progressively worse major adverse kidney events and mortality, characterized epidemiology and survival in children receiving CRRT, identified factors associated with successful CRRT liberation, described the impact of sepsis and dialytrauma on CRRT outcomes, and reported the first large-scale multicenter assessment of functional outcomes in children on renal replacement therapy.
Her research in CS-AKI spans risk factor identification, biomarker integration, and AKI phenotyping. She has authored influential reviews on CS-AKI risk stratification in children and has advanced the understanding of AKI subphenotypes — including severity, duration, and biomarker-defined phenotypes — that carry distinct prognostic and therapeutic implications. She is the lead investigator of the proposed BRAVE-HEART (Biomarker and Renal Angina Validation to assess Heart-Kidney Outcomes after Amino Acid Therapy) trial, a six-center, double-blind, placebo-controlled randomized clinical trial evaluating amino acid therapy for the prevention of CS-AKI in high-risk children, incorporating precision enrichment using the renal angina index, renal near-infrared spectroscopy, metabolomics, and urine NGAL for mechanistic discovery.
Dr. Gist has been a key contributor to the 26th Acute Disease Quality Initiative (ADQI) Consensus Conference on pediatric AKI, a National Institute of Health sponsored consensus meeting on kidney health follow-up in neonatal intensive care unit graduates, and the 36th ADQI on acute kidney injury, fluid accumulation and RRT across the lifespan in patients needing extracorporeal membrane oxygenation. Her collaborative work extends across multiple pediatric research networks, including the Neonatal and Pediatric Heart and Renal Outcomes Network (NEPHRON), the Neonatal Kidney Collaborative (NKC) and the .
Her scholarly contributions span the full translational spectrum — from AKI pathobiology and biomarker science to clinical trial methodology, endpoint selection, and the design of learning health systems in pediatric critical care nephrology. She is a Fellow of the American Heart Association, reflecting her sustained contributions to cardiovascular and kidney science in children