RICHARD KNIGHT

MBA, Immediate Past President, former AAKP Vice President

Richard A. Knight is a kidney transplant recipient of eighteen years and a former hemodialysis patient. He is the Past President of the American Association of Kidney Patients (AAKP) and serves on numerous advisory boards and committees. Richard is an Adjunct Instructor at Bowie State University and a founding member of BSU’s College of Business Advisory Council. Additionally, he is a Board Member of the Personalized Medicine Coalition, advocating for the adoption of personalized medicine to benefit patients and health systems.

More recently, Richard has held significant roles, including membership on the National Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) Advisory Council, Co-Chair of the NIDDK Strategic Plan Stakeholder Engagement Subgroup, and participation in the Steering Committee for NIDDK’s Kidney Precision Medicine Project (KPMP) and the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients (SRTR) Visiting Committee. He has also contributed to nine Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Technical Expert Panels (TEPs).

Currently, Richard co-chairs the NIDDK KPMP’s Community Engagement Committee and serves on the Xenotransplantation Advisory Committee and the Collaborating Leaders to Address Racism with Interventions for Equity-Kidney Disease (CLARIFy-KD) Project. Richard also serves as Chair of the Patient Advisory Committee for the NIH/NIDDK project Caring for OutPatiEnts after Acute Kidney Injury (COPE-AKI) He is a member of the International Society of Nephrologists’ Patient Liaison Advisory Group (PLAG) and the Critical Path Institute’s BioMarker Data Repository Governing Committee.

Richard’s commitment has been recognized with the President’s Volunteer Service Award from President Trump in 2020 and the President’s Lifetime Achievement Award from President Biden in 2022. In 2017, he received the American Society of Nephrologists President’s Award.

As an international advocate for kidney patients, Richard frequently speaks on topics such as increasing diversity in clinical trials and restructuring healthcare systems to offer more innovative patient choices. His work has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, Nature, Clinical Transplantation, the American Journal of Kidney Disease, and Patient Education and Counseling.

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