Amy Waterman, PhD

• Research Director, National Kidney Registry
• Professor in Residence, UCLA Nephrology
• Deputy Director, Transplant Research and Education, Terasaki Research Institute

Amy Waterman, PhD, is the NKR Research Director and the Chair of the Research Committee. She is a national transplant innovator and a Professor in Residence at the University of California Los Angeles in the Division of Nephrology. She is Director of the Transplant Research and Education Center (TREC) and Deputy Director of the Terasaki Research Institute.

In addition to many national transplant leadership positions, Dr. Waterman is a Fellow of the American Society of Transplantation. In 2018, she received the ClearMark Award of Distinction from the Center for Plain Language for her interactive digital application, My Transplant Coach, as well as a National Health Information Merit Award for two educational initiatives developed by Explore Transplant, a nonprofit consortium Dr. Waterman founded. In 2016, Dr. Waterman was invited to be the keynote speaker at the White House Organ Donation Summit.

Through her research and educational initiatives, Dr. Waterman seeks to 1) understand the critical, modifiable patient, provider, and system barriers to donation and 2) design interventions to overcome them. Dr. Waterman’s research has been supported by over $25 million dollars in federal grants, and she has authored approximately 100 research articles and book chapters. She has designed 13 educational programs to help patients and potential living donors make informed transplant decisions. These programs have been disseminated to patients in hundreds of dialysis and transplant settings in the United States, Canada and South Africa, in multiple languages.

Dr. Waterman received her PhD in Social Psychology from Washington University, St. Louis, MO.