Dr. Sharma is the Director of the Center for Renal Translational Medicine and Institute for Metabolomic Medicine and Professor of Medicine at UCSD in San Diego. He is Chair of the ISN Nexus Symposium, which is an international translational symposium, and previously served as Associate Editor of the American Journal of Physiology-Renal and the journal Diabetes. He completed his MD and Internal Medicine residency at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. His clinical and research nephrology fellowship was completed at the University of Pennsylvania. He was a past president of the San Diego American Diabetes Association and is a present member of the National Research Council of the American Diabetes Association and the American Society of Nephrology Research Advocacy Committee. He is also the founder of a company, Clinical Metabolomics, Inc., that supports drug development for diabetes and its complications. His research has been continuously funded by the NIH for the past 20 years and has also received major support from the JDRF and American Diabetes Association. Dr. Sharma has had a dedicated and consistent translational approach for diabetic complications for the past 20 years and has expertise in developing phenotype analysis using imaging, molecular and biochemical methods, genomics, microarray, proteomics and metabolomics. His group has had numerous studies linking clinical phenotypes of patients with genomics and biomarkers. His recent studies have employed novel imaging and systems biology approaches to understand novel mechanisms related to obesity-related complications, diabetic kidney disease and novel therapies. His work has had a major impact in the field with respect to novel anti-fibrotic therapies for chronic kidney disease and his group has completed a multi-center NIH funded clinical trial with an oral anti-fibrotic agent. His major focus in the past few years has been to develop novel biomarkers for chronic kidney disease and diabetic complications. In particular, recent metabolomic studies in humans have led to novel insights into the pathogenesis of diabetic complications and the role of the kidney in energy metabolism.