Creating a bioartificial kidney as a permanent solution to kidney failure
Medical Director William Fissell
William H. Fissell, MD, is a physician scientist who has devoted his career to patient care and translational research in renal disease.
Fissell earned BS degrees in physics and electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He built on his engineering training at Case Western Reserve University, where he earned an MD, and then completed postgraduate training in internal medicine at University Hospitals of Cleveland and the Louis B. Stokes Cleveland Veteran’s Administration Hospital.
Fissell then moved to University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, for his fellowship in nephrology, where he trained with H. David Humes, MD, developer of the first bioartificial kidney used in clinical trials. He remained at the University of Michigan for his first two faculty appointments before moving to the Cleveland Clinic in 2007.
Fissell is an associate professor of clinical medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Before moving to Vanderbilt in fall 2012, he was the director of the Renal Nanotechnology Laboratory at the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, where he pioneered work in the application of silicon nanotechnology to hemodialysis and hemofiltration. He has been supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the American Society of Nephrology Carl W. Gottschalk Award.