Vivek Charu, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Pathology, Stanford University

Research Description: The overall goal of the Charu Laboratory is to develop novel statistical approaches for risk prediction and clinical trial design in chronic kidney and liver disease. Dr. Charu is a kidney/liver pathologist and also a faculty biostatistician in the Quantitative Sciences Unit in the Department of Medicine, where he directs a team of experienced statisticians and data scientists. His group has been developing noninvasive scores to predict significant fibrosis in patients with metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD), leveraging data from the electronic health record and clinical trials. His group has also been identifying new histologic subtypes of adult and pediatric MASLD by developing and applying artificial intelligence tools to whose-slide images from a robust tissue repository of MASLD biopsies curated at Stanford University Medical Center. Dr. Charu serves as the Associate Director of the Clinical and Translational Core of the Stanford Diabetes Research Center (SDRC). Dr. Charu’s research supports the NORC mission to understand how the consequences of obesity on MASLD as a key comorbidity. He collaborates extensively with many members of the NORC.