Uploaded July 2025 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
Jennifer Charlton, MD, is an associate professor in the Division of Pediatric Nephrology.
Transcript
I love that I have the privilege and the pleasure of working with a large diverse group of researchers. I love that I have the opportunity to work with trainees, to teach them about our research and engage them in research. And I love that I have the opportunity to share that research with our patients and our families. My name is Jennifer Charlton. I'm an associate professor in the department of pediatrics. And I am a pediatric nephrologist, which means that I take care of kids that have kidney problems. My lab focuses on adverse maternal environments and how they can impact long-term kidney health, particularly for those that are born preterm or born early. I also collaborate with biomedical engineers from Washington University to develop non-invasive ways of measuring nephron number. So chronic kidney disease affects one in seven adult Americans, and in its most simple definition, chronic kidney disease is too few nephrons to do the work of the kidney. What most people don’t understand is that all of your nephrons in a human are made at the time you're born full-term. If you are born preterm, the risk of chronic kidney disease is much greater, and that is because of the life-saving therapies that these babies undergo at a very early and vulnerable period. My future hope is that our research will impact the lives of these preterm neonates by developing targeted therapies to reduce their risk for chronic kidney disease over their lifetime.
Jennifer Charlton, MD, is an associate professor in the Division of Pediatric Nephrology.
Transcript
I love that I have the privilege and the pleasure of working with a large diverse group of researchers. I love that I have the opportunity to work with trainees, to teach them about our research and engage them in research. And I love that I have the opportunity to share that research with our patients and our families. My name is Jennifer Charlton. I'm an associate professor in the department of pediatrics. And I am a pediatric nephrologist, which means that I take care of kids that have kidney problems. My lab focuses on adverse maternal environments and how they can impact long-term kidney health, particularly for those that are born preterm or born early. I also collaborate with biomedical engineers from Washington University to develop non-invasive ways of measuring nephron number. So chronic kidney disease affects one in seven adult Americans, and in its most simple definition, chronic kidney disease is too few nephrons to do the work of the kidney. What most people don’t understand is that all of your nephrons in a human are made at the time you're born full-term. If you are born preterm, the risk of chronic kidney disease is much greater, and that is because of the life-saving therapies that these babies undergo at a very early and vulnerable period. My future hope is that our research will impact the lives of these preterm neonates by developing targeted therapies to reduce their risk for chronic kidney disease over their lifetime.
