ASCI / Young Physician-Scientist Awards, 2023
The Young Physician-Scientist Awards (YPSA) recognize physician-scientists who are early in their first faculty appointment and have made notable achievements in their research.
About the awardee
Kenneth Lim, MD, PhD, MPhil, FASN is an American Physician-Scientist and Nephrologist and currently holds appointments as Tenure-Track Assistant Professor of Medicine and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Anatomy, Cell Biology & Physiology at Indiana University School of Medicine (IUSM), and Attending Physician at IU Health. Prior to joining the faculty at IUSM in 2020, he spent over 10 years at Harvard Medical School and affiliated major teaching hospitals, later becoming Attending Physician at The Massachusetts General Hospital and faculty member at Harvard Medical School. He is a clinical trialist and translational scientist, and leads a research group that focuses on the development and delivery of definitive trials in patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) and associated cardiovascular (CV) complications, and the development of advanced therapeutics. Currently, a substantial gap exists in the lack of robust outcomes trials in patients with CKD and critically, the need for better clinical trial endpoints to track cardiovascular decline or improvement. To help counteract this problem, his research pioneered the entry of state-of-the-art Cardiopulmonary Exercise Testing (CPET) technology into the field of nephrology. He founded the first CPET laboratory dedicated to the study of patients with kidney disease in the United States at IUSM. His research has provided foundational evidence that CPET-derived endpoints are superior to cardiac geometric endpoints for tracking cardiovascular alterations in states of impaired kidney function. His work has helped answer important questions on ventilatory exercise derived responses in CKD. The technology could have potential widespread applications for example, in identifying high risk kidney patients for earlier or more aggressive medical or dialytic therapy, and could help improve current prioritization strategies for patients on the kidney transplant list (whereby the already scarce availability of donor organs could be better allocated to patients who need it most) and improve survival for kidney patients.