Ravi Thadhani

Dr. Ravi Thadhani is the Chief Academic Officer at Partners healthcare and is the former chief of the renal unit at the Massachusetts General Hospital, where he has worked since 1991, also serving as director of clinical research in nephrology for more than a decade. He is also a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. In the dialysis arena, Dr. Thadhani has conducted studies examining the effect of vitamin D in the survival of chronic hemodialysis patients, and through a series of worldwide studies, links between vitamin and dialysis survival were confirmed by more than a dozen independent investigators. Clinical practices have implemented practice patterns aligned with this work, and international practice guidelines have highlighted the series of studies Dr. Thadhani led.

Focused on the cardiovascular import of vitamin D signaling, Dr. Thadhani pursued animal models of heart disease and studied the effect of the vitamin on preventing cardiac hypertrophy. His team’s human and animal studies led to investigator-initiated multicenter, multinational clinical trials with patients affected by kidney disease. His team conducted the first randomized trial in nephrology to test the effects of active vitamin D therapy on cardiac hypertrophy. Subsequent work led to the start of another first-of-its-kind randomized trial in chronic hemodialysis subjects to test the altered immune response derived from doses of nutritional vitamin D.