ASCI / Young Physician-Scientist Awards, 2023

Titilayo Omolara Ilori, MD, MSc is a physician scientist with expertise in nephrology, epidemiology, nutrition, genetics, and global health. Her goal is to be an independent, patient-oriented researcher, skilled in conducting mechanistic and interventional studies on the modifiers of kidney disease. Dr. Ilori completed medical school in the University of Lagos, Nigeria and moved to the United States for internal medicine residency training at the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta. During fellowship training in nephrology at Emory University, she completed a basic science post-doctoral research fellowship working with Dr. Jeff Sands. At the time, Dr. Ilori made a major discovery that the urea transporter, (UT-A1) can be phosphorylated by tacrolimus, a calcineurin inhibitor, an important finding because it showed that tacrolimus could phosphorylate UT-A1 independent of vasopressin. Dr. Ilori switched gears to patient-oriented research because of her passion to find solutions to the intricate drivers of health disparities among individuals of African descent. Her formal training in clinical research includes a Master of Science from Emory University and certificate courses from Columbia and Harvard, all in Clinical Research. Dr. Ilori has worked within various population and CKD cohorts in the US and sub-Saharan Africa. She rose to Assistant Professor at Emory and transitioned to the University of Arizona (UA). As a coinvestigator in the All of Us Research Program, and the Associate Director of Clinical Research and Global Health Initiatives at the UA, she lead a team that enrolled >20,000 individuals underrepresented in biomedical research. Now as an Assistant Professor at Boston University, she received a K23 career development grant from the NIH studying diet by gene interactions in Apolipoprotein L1 (APOL1) kidney disease, caused by a powerful genetic risk variant affecting individuals of African descent. Dr. Ilori's lab recently discovered that dietary potassium interacts with APOL1 genotypes, a finding that we are confirming in clinical and mechanistic studies.