Satoshi Shimada, PhD

During my medical and nephrology residency training in Japan, I became deeply interested in the regulation of body fluid volume, renal function and hypertension and decided to pursue an academic career. As a medical student at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan, I had the good fortune to be taught by two highly respected clinical scientists, Drs. Sadayoshi Ito and Takefumi Mori. With their encouragement, I decided to pursue an academic career as they served as my mentors for my PhD research training program. It was from these two deeply committed and highly respected investigators from whom I learned much physiology and how to ask meaningful and testable questions of clinical relevance. I learned and applied many basic research techniques such as rtPCR, western blotting, and immunohistochemistry. Most uniquely, I learned to perform both acute and chronic surgical techniques in rats, including catheterization of vessels and ureters. By using these methods in my dissertation research, I was able to advance our understanding of renal fibrosis by developing a novel rat of renal congestion which mimics cardio renal syndrome type 1.

To further advance my training in this field, I joined the preeminent renal physiology laboratory of Dr. Allen Cowley in 2018. Over the past years I have been learning many new techniques and pursued studies in several areas, one of which was the mechanism of immune cell infiltration into the kidneys under angiotensin II induced hypertension by using our unique computer-driven servo-control system. I have established methods to obtain continuous (24 hr/day) measurement of renal blood flow in chronically instrumented rats in response to a variety of stimuli. Preliminary results of some of this work has been presented at the several international conferences and I have now further developed this technique to enable us to measure blood pressure (BP), RBF, arterial and renal venous (AV) blood and urinary metabolites, and oxygen extraction in the kidney simultaneously in conscious Sprague-Dawley rats. Some of these data will be presented at the Experimental Biology (EB) 2021. In other studies, I have been studying mechanisms of kidney hypertrophy following unilateral nephrectomy and the role of mTOR in these events. In these studies, I have applied my techniques of continuous recording of renal blood flow in unanesthetized rats to measure the sequential changes in renal hemodynamics during renal hypertrophy. This manuscript is currently in preparation.

It has been a major goal of my early post-doctoral training to establish novel methods that enable the study of kidney function and blood pressure regulation in unanesthetized settings so the progression of changes in kidney function and metabolic processes can be determined in normal and pathophysiological states. Although challenging, these techniques will provide sequential metabolic flux data in the absence of anesthesia and surgical trauma within the same individual (rat) which has not been previously possible.

My career goal is to become a successful scientist in the field of renal physiology. I believe my clinical training combined with training in basic research will enable me to address questions of relevance to patients with acute and chronic kidney disease associated with hypertension and diabetes. It is my plan to learn as much as possible during my fellowship with Dr. Cowley and hope that I will then find opportunities for an interesting academic career in either the United States or Japan.

The Chairman`s Award, Japanese Society of Pathophysiology in Kidney Failure (12/2017)
Travel Award, ISN Frontiers Meetings (2/2018)
New Investigator Award for Japanese Fellows, AHA/ASH Joint Hypertension Sessions (9/2019)
Trainee Onsite Poster Award, AHA/ASH Joint Hypertension Sessions (9/2019)
Postdoctoral Excellence in Renal Research Award Finalist, Experimental Biology 2020 APS Renal Section (4/2020)
Kidney Council New Investigator Travel Award, Council on Kidney in Cardiovascular Disease (9/2020)
High impact paper in hypertension for Fall of 2020 (10/2020)
2021 Renal Section Research Recognition Award, Experimental Biology 2021 APS Renal Section (4/2021)