Jeremy Puthumana, an MD candidate at the School of Medicine, has been named to Forbes' "30 Under 30" list for 2019 celebrating achievement in science. Forbes describes the list, and similar ones for people honored in other categories, as "a collection of bold risk-takers putting a new twist on the old tools of the trade."
According to Forbes, "Jeremy Puthumana's research into hypertension helped determine how kidneys help regulate blood pressure, leading to new treatments. Now he's focused on kidney function, leading to discoveries around how different kidney diseases work, and how to make it possible for more kidney transplants to occur."
Chirag R. Parikh, MD, PhD, now director of the Division of Nephrology at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, was principal investigator for research that Puthumana published when Parikh was a professor of medicine at Yale and director of the medical school's Program of Applied Translational Research. "Jeremy is intelligent, meticulous, hard-working and wise beyond his years," says Parikh. "He was able to grasp complex medical concepts with ease during his undergraduate years [at Yale] and excelled as a research assistant, publishing first-author papers, before he even entered medical school." Prior to enrolling at Yale School of Medicine, Puthumana did research at the National Institutes of Health and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Parikh adds, "Jeremy’s innovative translational research on identifying repair pathways after ischemic injury led to the identification of the YKL-40 protein in the urine of deceased donors who had acute kidney injury. The measurement of this protein has the potential to reduce kidney discard and expand the pool of deceased donor kidneys available for transplantation."