KDOQI Leadership Roster

The National Kidney Foundation Board of Directors appoints the KDOQI Chair and Vice Chairs, who provide overall direction and ongoing guidance to the initiative. They interact closely with project work groups and work group chairs, preside over KDOQI meetings, and serve as KDOQI spokespeople.

Michael Rocco, MD, MSCE, FNKF
KDOQI Chair

Holly Kramer, MD, FNKF
Vice Chair, Commentaries

Bernard Jaar, MD, MPH, FNKF
Vice Chair, Education

Michael J. Choi, MD
Vice Chair, Policy

Michael V. Rocco, MD, MSCE, FNKF is Professor of Medicine at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He received his MD degree from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee and also served his Internal Medicine residency at Vanderbilt. He completed a nephrology fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and received a master's degree in epidemiology at Wake Forest University. He has been on the faculty of the Wake Forest University School of Medicine since 1991 and currently holds the Vardaman M. Buckalew Jr. Chair in Nephrology. He has more than 100 manuscripts and book chapters in the areas of hemodialysis, peritoneal dialysis, nutrition, chronic renal failure and epidemiology. He has served as the clinical center Principal Investigator at Wake Forest for several NIH trials, including the HEMO Study, the Acute Renal Failure Trial Network (ATN), the Dialysis Access Consortium (DAC) and the Frequent Hemodialysis Network (FHN). In the HEMO Study he served as the Chair of the Nutrition committee and the Vice-Chair of the Outcomes Committee. In the FHN Trial, he is the Clinical Core Consortium PI for the Nocturnal Trial and the Chair of the Outcomes Committee. Dr. Rocco is currently the Chair of the National Kidney Foundation Kidney Disease Outcomes Quality Initiative (KDOQI); he served as the Vice-Chair for KDOQI from 2003 - 2007 and was the vice-chair for the NKF KDOQI Hypertension Work Group.

Holly J. Kramer, MD, FNKF is an associate professor and a kidney disease specialist at the Loyola University Medical Center who studies the epidemiology of kidney disease including both environmental and genetic factors for incidence and progression. After graduating from Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis, Dr. Kramer trained in internal medicine at Emory University School of Medicine. Dr. Kramer specialized in nephrology through a fellowship at the Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston. She also holds a master's degree in public health from the Harvard School of Public Health.

Bernard Jaar, MD, MPH is an Assistant Professor of Medicine (part-time) in the Division of Nephrology, Department of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine with Joint Appointment in the Department of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He is also an Associate Faculty member of the Welch Center for Prevention, Epidemiology and Clinical research at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. He holds a Master of Public Health degree from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians, of the American Society of Nephrology and of the National Kidney Foundation. He serves on the Editorial Board of several nephrology journals and has authored or coauthored over 120 peer reviewed manuscripts. He is the immediate past Chair of the Medical Advisory Board of the National Kidney Foundation of Maryland; he is Co-Chair of the National Kidney Foundation Education Committee and a member of the Exam Writing Committee of the American Board of Internal Medicine Sub-Specialty in Nephrology. He is Chair of the State of Maryland Commission on Kidney Disease. In addition, he is a busy practicing nephrologist with the Nephrology Center of Maryland.

Michael J. Choi is associate professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and served as nephrology fellowship director from 1996-2009. Dr. Choi is trained in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry after graduating from the Yale University, and received his Postdoctoral from the Penn Center of Molecular Studies of Kidney Disease, followed by his fellowship training at the University Of Pennsylvania School Of Medicine. His clinical interests are primary glomerular diseases and nephrolithiasis. Dr. Choi is the co-editor of the Oxford Manual of Nephrology, Deputy Editor of Advances in Chronic Kidney Diseases, and served as chair of the NKF Spring 2011 Spring Clinical Meetings. He previously served as education chair of the NKF Kidney Disease Outcomes Quality Initiative (KDOQI) and founded the NKF education committee in 2015.