Burkhard Tönshoff, MD, PhD, is professor of pediatrics and pediatric nephrology at the University Children’s Hospital Heidelberg, Germany. He currently holds the position of a Vice Chairman of the Department of Pediatrics I (General Pediatrics, Neuropediatrics, Metabolism, Gastroenterology, and Nephrology) and is Medical Director of the pediatric kidney transplantation program. He graduated from the Freiburg University School of Medicine, and completed a pediatric residency and fellowship at the University Children’s Hospital in Heidelberg, Germany. From 1992 to 1994, he served as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Division of Pediatric Nephrology and Department of Physiology, State University of New York at Stony Brook, USA.
His current clinical research focuses on various issues in chronic renal failure and renal transplantation, such as studies on the pharmacokinetics, efficacy and safety of novel immunosuppressive drugs in pediatric renal transplant recipients, optimization of immunosuppressive therapy by therapeutic drug monitoring and immune monitoring, prevention of infectious and other complications after renal transplantation, and biomarker-guided minimization of immunosuppressive therapy. Since 2006, he serves as the pediatric advisor in the Eurotransplant Kidney Advisory Committee. In the year 2009 he founded the Cooperative European Paediatric Renal Transplant Initiative (CERTAIN; www.certain-registry.eu) as a multicenter research network and platform built on a novel, web-based registry. Other research activities focus on the pathophysiology and therapy of the nephrotic syndrome, biomarker research for acute kidney injury and the role of endothelial progenitor cells and mesenchymal stem cells in various pediatric kidney and lung diseases.
He has authored or co-authored 283 original and review articles, 82 book chapters and 6 books. He is member of the editorial boards of Pediatric Nephrology and Therapeutic Drug Monitoring. Dr. Tönshoff has served until 2017 as the President of the International Pediatric Transplant Association (IPTA). Since the year 2018 he acts as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Pediatric Transplantation, the official journal of IPTA.