Jhaveri Poised to Bring Innovative Ideas to ASN Kidney News

As a child, Kenar Jhaveri, MD, FASN, often found creative ways to demonstrate his school learning, from performing skits to creating crossword puzzles. That continued in his nephrology career teaching medical trainees. Now, Jhaveri is excited to bring his passion for innovation and education to ASN Kidney News, where he becomes the new editor-in-chief in January 2021.

ASN’s monthly newsmagazine “does a great job of reaching the whole nephrology community, covering a good mix of fun and serious topics,” said Jhaveri, professor of medicine at the Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell and associate chief of the Division of Kidney Disease and Hypertension at Northwell Health, NY. He wants to build upon that to make the magazine the most innovative in the field.

“I want to enhance the magazine by bringing more of an international presence,” he said. “I want to include more policy information because a lot of things are changing in nephrology. I also want to make the publication more visual, incorporating more figures and visual abstracts to summarize articles using graphics. With our diverse and dynamic editorial board, I think this is not an impossible task to achieve.”

Longer articles written in straight text appeal to readers and nonvisual learners, but they potentially can lose audience members who learn best through visual information, Jhaveri noted.

The magazine can be positioned to showcase interesting work in nephrology to attract more medical students and residents to the field, he added. There has been a decline in applicants for nephrology training positions for a number of reasons, he said, including the potential difficulty in mastering the science, a shortage of good mentors in some hospitals, and declining reimbursement for some patient care services.

“The good news is, the tides are turning,” Jhaveri said. “A lot of places have restructured how they teach and rotate residents and students in nephrology, and this was the first year we saw a positive trend toward residents applying for nephrology fellowships. “The COVID-19 pandemic has a silver lining for nephrology,” he noted. “Nephrologists were on the front lines supervising dialysis being given to COVID-19 patients, and residents and students saw us being the consultants who were needed in the time of a crisis.”

Jhaveri’s editorial history dates back to 2011, when he was selected as the inaugural editor of AJKD blog, the launching platform for NephMadness in 2013, which became the first online game in medicine. Jhaveri also is the creator and longtime editor of the popular Kidney News column “Detective Nephron,” which features a Sherlock Holmes-type master clinician helping a budding nephrologist form diagnoses for interesting cases. Jhaveri devised the idea himself, and pitched it to the magazine.

“My whole interest has been in innovation and education in nephrology. I always thought, ‘Why are we stuck with this one way of teaching?’” he said. “Ten years ago I started using crossword puzzles, anagrams, comic strips, blogs, and other social media methods to expand the way of teaching nephrology. It keeps me excited about it, too.”

The clinical cases discussed in Detective Nephron were sometimes thought up by Jhaveri, sometimes based on his patients, and sometimes written to include trends in nephrology. Jhaveri also gathered information about interesting cases from other nephrologist colleagues.

Jhaveri received his medical degree from State University of New York–Upstate Medical University in Syracuse in 2004. He completed a residency in internal medicine at Yale New Haven Hospital in Connecticut and a fellowship in nephrology at New York Presbyterian Hospital, in New York City. He joined the faculty at Northwell Health in 2009.

In addition to being an active member of numerous professional medical societies, he serves on the editorial boards of CJASN, AJKD, Kidney International, Nephrology Dialysis Transplantation, Clinical Kidney Journal, and Journal of Onconephrology. Jhaveri also developed a nephrology blog, nephronpower.com, to inform and connect with academics.

His current research projects include studying kidney toxicities of targeted anti-cancer agents and immunotherapy, kidney disease after hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, glomerular diseases in cancer patients, the use of immunotherapy in kidney transplant patients, and COVID-19–related kidney disease. Two recent studies on AKI patients hospitalized with COVID-19 were published in Kidney International (1) and AJKD (2).

“I want to thank ASN for giving me this opportunity,” he said. “With a diverse and dynamic editorial board and a talented and experienced editor, we want to show our readers the vibrant research happening in nephrology. We want to share the upcoming news and important topics relevant to our readers in a timely and creative manner.”