The Division of Nephrology welcomes Frank J. O’Brien, MD, who will be joining the division as an Assistant Professor of Medicine.
Dr. O’Brien received his medical degree, with first-class honors, from University College Cork, Ireland. He completed his residency in internal medicine at the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland, with subsequent transplant specialty training at Beaumont Hospital Dublin. Dr. O’Brien completed higher specialty training in nephrology at the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland, followed by a fellowship in nephrology at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.
Dr. O’Brien has received multiple awards (Transplant Medal, Dialysis Medal and the Vincent Dolan Memorial Medal) from the Irish Nephrology Society in recognition of his research presentations at the society’s meetings. He recently received an award for Outstanding Clinical Research from the University of California San Diego Young Investigator Forum (2017).
From 2016-2017, Dr. O’Brien was a Jack and Marion Euphrat Pediatric Translational Medicine Fellow at the Child Health Research Institute at Stanford. He received a fellowship grant for his project Assessment of dialysis efficacy in pediatric patients. The goal of the project was to investigate the extent to which uremic solutes are elevated in the plasma of pediatric dialysis patients by assessing dialysis kinetics and solute generation.
Dr. O’Brien’s main research interests focus on dialysis and acute kidney injury. He is primarily interested in discovering better markers to assess dialysis adequacy and more accurate techniques to predict the need for dialysis in acute kidney injury.
Off-time interests include traveling around Europe and the US, gourmet food, bar trivia, movies and the outdoors. He enjoys hiking, and exploring new areas.