David J. Salant, MD

Salant is Professor of Medicine and Vice-Chair for Research. He received his medical degree from University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa and completed his clinical training at the Johannesburg Hospital. He received his research training at Boston University with Dr. William G. Couser and joined BU’s nephrology faculty in 1979. Dr. Salant is an internationally renowned physician-scientist and an acclaimed educator. His research primarily explores the immune basis for glomerular diseases and the mechanisms of podocyte injury. He was among the first to identify podocytes as the primary target of injury in antibody-mediated glomerular diseases. In a landmark New England Journal of Medicine paper in 2009, Drs. Salant, Beck and colleagues described their discovery of the target antigen in membranous nephropathy and showed that a high proportion of MN patients have circulating autoantibodies to the antigen on human podocytes. Dr. Salant is a past chairman of the ABIM Nephrology Board.