Dr. Rajiv Saran, MBBS, DTCD, MD, MRCP, MS
Dr. Saran is a Florence E. Bingham Endowed Professor of Nephrology, Professor of Internal Medicine and Epidemiology in the Division of Nephrology, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI. Dr. Saran received his medical degree – MBBS, from JIPMER, Pondicherry, India, and postgraduate training (MD Internal Medicine) from PGIMER, Chandigarh, India. He went on to receive specialized training in Nephrology in the UK at the Cardiff Royal Infirmary, Cardiff, and the Freeman Hospital, in Newcastle upon Tyne, prior to arriving in the US, where he completed his Fellowship in Nephrology and Residency in Internal Medicine, at the University of Missouri, Columbia, MO.
Passionate about preventing chronic diseases with kidney disease as an exemplar, through the power of ‘data-to-knowledge-to-action’ paradigm, Dr. Saran now has an extensive portfolio of Clinical and Health Services Research and specializes in developing Surveillance Systems for Chronic Kidney Disease and End Stage Kidney Disease. Specific research focus areas have included characterization of the epidemiology of the CKD and its risk factors, investigating the cardio-renal link, optimizing vascular access as the lifeline of hemodialysis, and investigations into key dialysis-related practice patterns related to improving patient outcomes. He previously served as University of Michigan’s Lead Investigator on the Dialysis Outcomes and Practice Patterns Study (DOPPS), and as the Director of the United States Renal Data System (USRDS) Coordinating Center, based at the Kidney Epidemiology and Cost Center. He has been instrumental in establishing and continues to lead the CDC’s National Kidney Disease Surveillance System, with its mission of prioritizing prevention of kidney disease in the United States. His recent work has leaned toward refining surveillance systems to tackle disparities, and prediction analytics to help inform earlier stage prevention and improve quality of care.
Dr. Jennifer Bragg-Gresham, MS, PhD
Dr. Bragg-Gresham is a Research Scientist at the University of Michigan, specializing in kidney disease at the Kidney Epidemiology and Cost Center. With a background in biostatistics and epidemiology, she has over 25+ years of experience, authoring and supporting hundreds of publications on dialysis and kidney disease. Dr. Bragg-Gresham currently serves as Co-Principal Investigator on the CDC Kidney Disease Surveillance System, where she provides epidemiologic and analytic expertise. Her research focuses on risk factors for kidney disease, including genetics and aging, as well as the impact of social and environmental determinants on chronic kidney disease (CKD).
Dr. Tiffany C.E. Veinot, PhD, MLS
Tiffany Veinot, MLS, PhD, FACMI is Joan C. Durrance Collegiate Professor at the University of Michigan (U-M)’s School of Information. She is also a Full Professor at the Schools of Public Health and Medicine at U-M, and was a Visiting Professor at Oxford University’s Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences (United Kingdom) in 2023-2024. Veinot's research focuses on “community health informatics,” or the use of information systems and services to improve the health of marginalized populations and reduce health disparities. She has over 115 published, peer-reviewed papers, and her published research has garnered 19 honors and awards in the health informatics, human-computer interaction, and information science fields. Veinot has held 28 extramural research funding awards from entities in the United States, Canada and United Kingdom. These awards have totaled $15.5 million in funding as Principal Investigator or Co-Principal Investigator and $10 million as co-Investigator. She is currently PI of a national cluster-randomized controlled trial investigating digital interventions to prevent complications of hemodialysis care and is co-PI of the CDC’s national Kidney Disease Surveillance System. She is a founding faculty member and former Director of the Master of Health Informatics (MHI) Program at U-M, which was launched in 2012 and has graduated over 300 students. She is the Founding Chair of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Health and Healthcare Equity Working Group, and is currently serving in that role for a second year. Prior to this, she co-chaired the health equity-focused Workgroup on Interactive Systems in Healthcare (WISH) Symposium in 2020 and the Computing Community Consortium’s workshop on “Research Opportunities in Sociotechnical Interventions for Health Disparity Reduction” in 2018. She served as Associate Dean for faculty at the U-M School of Information from 2019-2023. She is an Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA) and is on the Editorial Boards of the International Journal of Medical Informatics,and the Journal of the Association of Information Science and Technology.She was also the first author of AMIA’s policy principle on “Health and Healthcare Equity,” which was approved by the AMIA Board in 2025. She was elected to the American College of Medical Informatics in 2022.