Vivek Charu

Vivek Charu, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Pathology; Assistant Professor, Department of Medicine (Biostatistics Section of the Biomedical Informatics Research Division, Quantitative Sciences Unit)

Research Description: Dr. Charu is a physician and biostatistician. He has expertise in the design of experiments and the application of advanced causal inference techniques in observational studies. He has made novel methodological contributions to the analysis of large-scale observational data, statistical network models, and clinical trials. Dr. Charu is also a board-certified anatomic pathologist with clinical expertise in medical renal pathology, including transplantation. His current research interests center on predicting renal prognosis in diabetic nephropathy. He is using ensemble learning methods (which combine predictions across several statistical and machine learning models) to generate patient-level predictions of the time to end-stage kidney disease in patients with diabetic nephropathy, based on clinical/demographic data and histopathologic morphometric measurements. This work leverages a unique biorepository of biopsy-confirmed diabetic nephropathy cases he has assembled and housed in the Department of Pathology. This material will be expanded upon and opened to the broader SDRC community for research related to diabetic nephropathy. Dr. Charu will also serve as co-director of the Clinical & Translational Research Core (CTC) starting in 2022, once the P30 renewal is funded.

Selected relevant publications (SDRC Members in BOLD):

  1. Boyle RA, Baker JE, Charu V, Rainey WE, Bhalla V. Masking by hypokalemia-primary aldosteronism with undetectable aldosterone. Clin Kidney J. 2020 Oct 7;14(4):1269-1271. doi: 10.1093/ckj/sfaa150. PMID: 33841871; PMCID: PMC8023175. 

  2. Falasinnu T, O'Shaughnessy MM, Troxell ML, Charu V, Weisman MH, Simard JF. A review of non-immune mediated kidney disease in systemic lupus erythematosus: A hypothetical model of putative risk factors. Semin Arthritis Rheum. 2020 Jun;50(3):463-472. doi: 10.1016/j.semarthrit.2019.10.006. PMID: 31866044. 

  3. Charu V, O'Shaughnessy MM, Chertow GM, Kambham N. Percutaneous Kidney Biopsy and the Utilization of Blood Transfusion and Renal Angiography Among Hospitalized Adults. Kidney Int Rep. 2019 Jul 23;4(10):1435-1445. doi: 10.1016/j.ekir.2019.07.008. PMID: 31701053; PMCID: PMC6829181. 

  4. Wesolowski A, Erbach-Schoenberg E, Tatem A, Laurenco C, Viboud C, Charu V, Eagle N, Eng-Monsen K, Qureshi T, Buckee CO, Metcalf, CJE. Multinational patterns of seasonal asymmetry in human movement influence infectious disease dynamics. Nature Communications, 2017. 

  5. Charu V, Rosenberg PB, Schneider LS, Drye LT, Rein L, Shade D, Lyketsos CG, Frangakis CE. Characterizing Highly Benefited Patients in Randomized Clinical Trials. Int J Biostat. 2017 May 20;13(1):/j/ijb.2017.13.issue-1/ijb-2016-0045/ijb-2016-0045.xml. doi: 10.1515/ijb-2016-0045. PMID: 28541924; PMCID: PMC6428065.