Michael Fu
University of Maryland, MD·Engineering
A kidney transplant is the best treatment for end-stage kidney disease. Even so, many patients who have a willing living donor cannot use that donor's kidney because their blood types or tissue types (human leukocyte antigens) do not match.
- Fields
Engineering
Mathematics & Statistics
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
kidney paired donation
kidney transplantation
desensitization
- Grants
- 1 known grant, last ended Sep 2026
What they work on
- Develop an optimization strategy to identify the optimal personalized desensitization protocol, the pre-surgery removal of antibodies that would otherwise cause rejection of a donated kidney.
- Create improved robust and stochastic optimization methods, which plan under uncertainty, to integrate desensitization therapy into kidney paired donation matching of donors and recipients.
- Build a decision-support tool that helps patients decide whether to accept desensitization with a less compatible kidney or wait for a more compatible one.
- Combine these components into a dynamic simulation-optimization model reporting suggested matchings, realized matchings under simulated patient behavior, and system performance metrics, then tailor it to two transplant centers forming a joint exchange.
More about the research
Doctors have two main workarounds. Kidney paired donation (KPD) lets incompatible patient-donor pairs swap donors with other pairs in a pool. Desensitization is a personalized treatment that removes harmful antibodies from the recipient's blood before surgery, lowering the risk that the new kidney is rejected. Each approach has limits, and transplant experts have called for combining them.
Why it matters
Combining donor swaps with personalized antibody-removal therapy could help more patients with end-stage renal disease receive a transplant, especially those with an incompatible living donor. Transplant centers could use the resulting matching algorithms to run local exchanges, and patients could use the decision tool to weigh accepting a less compatible kidney against waiting for a better one.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Laura Siminoff
Temple University, PA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Identify which provider communication behaviors during transplant evaluation consultations lead to living-donor inquiries, evaluations and transplants, using audio-recorded visits for 120 patients and pre- and post-visit surveys.
Arthur Matas
University of Minnesota, MN·Medicine & Clinical Research
Compare the long-term risk of end-stage kidney disease (ESKD, kidney failure requiring dialysis or transplant) and death between living kidney donors and healthy matched controls from the Rochester Epidemiology Project, with over 40 years of follow-up.
Viswanath Nagarajan
University of Michigan, MI·Computer Science
Design approximation algorithms with provable performance guarantees for sequential testing of systems made of interconnected components, including series-parallel structures, under complex cost structures.
The school
University of Maryland: 49 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 602 research doctorates a year.
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