Dr. Ravi Thadhani is the Chief Academic Officer at Partners HeathCare 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 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 the 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.
A member of many prestigious groups and societies, Dr. Thadhani has published more than 150 manuscripts and authored more than 35 publications, many of which have been featured in prominent health and research journals. He earned his medical degree from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, his master’s in public health from Harvard School of Public Health and a bachelor’s from the University of Notre Dame.
Additional positions and activities:
- Director for Harvard Medical School’s core medicine rotation at Massachusetts General Hospital
- Executive director of the Clinical Trials Office, Partners Healthcare
- Senior scientist, Department of Obstetrics, Massachusetts General Hospital
- Research scientist, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
- Assistant director of the Pasteur Program at Harvard Medical School
- Assistant director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Clinical Research Center
- Member of the clinical advisory board at DxNow
- Member of scientific advisory board at Altair Nanotechnologies Inc.
- Vice chair of the National Kidney Foundation’s clinical research committee and active member of the American Society of Nephrology
- Ad-hoc reviewer for the New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, Kidney International, American Journal of Kidney Diseases, Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, Nephrology Dialysis Transplantation, Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism and more
- Current editorial board member for Nephrology Dialysis and Transplantation, and former editorial board member for the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, the American Journal of Kidney Diseases, Kidney International and the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology