Olivier Devuyst, M.D., Ph.D., graduated from UCLouvain in Brussels (Belgium) and trained in Brussels and at the Technion Institute (Haifa, Israel) and the Johns Hopkins Medical School (Baltimore, USA). He is Full Professor of Medicine at the University of Zurich (Switzerland) and has a joint appointment as Professor of Medicine and Nephrology at UCLouvain Medical School and Saint-Luc Academic Hospital in Brussels, Belgium and at the ETH Zurich.

Dr. Devuyst and his group use a multi-level approach combining innovative disease models, deep phenotyping, and molecular and population genetics to investigate the mechanisms and to develop new therapeutic options for inherited kidney diseases. In parallel, O. Devuyst demonstrated the crucial role of water channels (aquaporins) in peritoneal dialysis and he developed preclinical strategies to improve the efficiency of dialysis and to reduce structural damage in the peritoneal membrane.

O. Devuyst has authored more than 350 articles that are cited > 20’000 times. He is funded by national and international agencies including the EU and the NIH. He served as President and Board Member in the Belgian and Swiss societies of nephrology, coordinated several EU-funded research networks and has founded the Working Group on Inherited Kidney Disorders (WGIKD) of the ERA-EDTA in 2011. He is among the founding members of the European Rare Kidney Disease Reference Network (ERKNET), where he is responsible for the autosomal dominant disorders.

Dr. Devuyst is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Medicine of Belgium and has been the laureate of several international prizes including the 2019 D.G. Oreopoulos Award of the Canadian Society of Nephrology and the 2019 ERA-EDTA Award for Outstanding Basic Science Contributions to Nephrology. He is Associate Editor of Kidney International, Nephrology Dialysis Transplantation, and Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases; and he serves in the Editorial Board of Clin J Am Soc Nephrol, Peritoneal Dialysis International, Frontiers in Physiology and Pflügers Archiv.