Recognition & Awards

Joel D. Kopple Award

The Joel D. Kopple Award is an annual award honoring an individual who has made significant contributions to the field of renal nutrition. The 2009 recipient is Raymond Hakim, MD.

Raymond HakimDr. Raymond Hakim is an Adjunct Professor in the Division of Nephrology and Hypertension at Vanderbilt University and Senior Executive Vice President of Clinical and Scientific Affairs for Fresenius Medical Care-NA. He received a PhD in Engineering from MIT in Boston, MA and his MD from McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He has been an invited speaker at numerous national and international conferences, held visiting professorships at several universities and sat on the editorial board of such journals as Seminars in Dialysis, American Journal of Kidney Disease and Kidney International. Dr. Hakim’s career-long research attention to nutrition intervention in ESRD, including early work on serum albumin as a marker of poor nutritional status, and his investigation into the use of nutritional supplements in ESRD is well known and has laid the foundation for other studies in this area. Dr. Hakim was also instrumental in adding a nutrition component to the Right Start program to help improve patient outcomes. In addition to malnutrition in dialysis patients, Dr. Hakim’s other research interests include growth factors in ESRD patients, trace metal toxicity in dialysis patients, chronic renal failure and blood materials interactions during extracorporeal therapy.

Past Recipients

2008 – Alison Steiber, PhD, RD, LD
2007 – Kamyar Kalantar-Zadeh, MD, PhD, MPH
2006 – Mary Pat Kelly, MS, RD, GNP
2005 – Jerrilynn D. Burrowes, PhD
2004 – Judith Beto, PhD, RD, FADA
2003 – Linda M. McCann, RD, LD, CSR
2002 – Linda Moore, RD, LDN