ASCI / Emerging-Generation Awards, 2024
The Emerging Generation Awards (E-Gen Awards) recognize post-MD, pre-faculty appointment physician-scientists who are meaningfully engaged in immersive research.
About the awardee
Katherine “Katie” Rizzolo, MD is a clinician-investigator and instructor in the Department of Nephrology at Boston Medical Center. Her research interests center on advocacy for underserved communities disproportionately by kidney disease, especially Latinx and immigrant populations. She received her MD from Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts, and her residency and chief residency in internal medicine at Maine Medical Center in Portland, Maine. She completed a clinical and research fellowship in nephrology at the University of Colorado in 2023, where her work was supported by their T32 postdoctoral fellowship. While in fellowship, her research aimed to establish the barriers and facilitators to home dialysis for Latinx populations with kidney failure. She is an Instructor in Nephrology at Boston University/Boston Medical Center and a research fellow in Boston University’s Evans Center for Implementation and Improvement Sciences from 2023-2025, which will support her current research aiming to utilize implementation strategies to improves access to, and uptake in, patient-centered dialysis education for Latinx populations with kidney failure. She publishes and presents nationally regarding improving access to kidney replacement therapies for Latinx and undocumented individuals with kidney failure. In 2022, she successfully advocated for a Medicaid policy change in Colorado allowing undocumented immigrants to receive home dialysis therapy. Her long term goal is to become an independent physician investigator utilizing mixed method research approaches and implementation science methodologies aimed at reducing kidney health disparities for vulnerable populations with kidney disease.