Josef Coresh

JOSEF CORESH, MD ‘92, PhD ‘92, MHS ’92, is the inaugural George W. Comstock Professor in the Department of Epidemiology. He also is a professor in the Department of Biostatistics at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and in Medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He directs the Bloomberg School’s George W. Comstock Center for Public Health Research and Prevention.

The 2010 recipient of the National Kidney Foundation’s Garabed Eknoyan Award, Coresh led the first rigorous evaluation of the prevalence of chronic kidney disease (CKD) in the U.S. and wrote the definitive paper on CKD trends over time. He played a leadership role with Dr. Levey in the development of the globally used staging system for CKD and equations to estimate kidney function. He was instrumental in the standardization of serum creatinine. His research activities have led to key contributions to national and international clinical practice guidelines for CKD. The CKD Prognosis Consortium, formed under his leadership, now includes 70 cohorts with over 10 million participants and has become the hub for using data to answer critical questions in kidney disease.

Coresh has led the Cardiovascular Epidemiology Training Program at the Bloomberg School since 1997. In 2010 he received the American Heart Association’s Epidemiology and Prevention Mentoring Award. He leads the Washington County Field Center of the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) cohort, recruiting many talented ARIC investigators at Hopkins. He expanded the research from heart disease and cancer to the vascular basis of cognitive decline and the impact of age related hearing loss.