Laura Siminoff
Temple University, PA·Public Health & Epidemiology
A kidney from a living donor is the preferred treatment for people with chronic and end-stage kidney disease. Compared with long-term dialysis or a kidney from a deceased donor, it costs less and leads to longer, healthier lives.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Social Science
- Topics
live donor kidney transplant
living kidney donation
kidney transplantation
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through May 2027
What they work on
- Identify which provider communication behaviors during transplant evaluation consultations lead to living-donor inquiries, evaluations and transplants, using audio-recorded visits for 120 patients and pre- and post-visit surveys.
- Measure how patient factors such as medical mistrust, health literacy and LDKT knowledge, along with provider comfort discussing LDKT, relate to living-donor transplant outcomes at two hospitals.
- Develop a communication skills training for transplant providers and test its direct and indirect effects on patient-reported outcomes and living-donor transplant outcomes.
- Explore how African American potential kidney donors understand APOL1 genetic testing, a test for a gene variant tied to kidney-disease risk, and how they prefer to make decisions, using up to six focus groups.
- Measure how potential donors weigh the risks and benefits of APOL1 testing and which trade-offs they accept, using a 500-person survey with Best-Worst Scaling.
- Build and refine a decision-support tool for genetic testing and living donation, guided by the Ottawa framework and tested in simulated consultations and with a Delphi panel of transplant experts.
More about the research
Yet living-donor transplants remain underused, especially among Black patients. This research asks how conversations between patients, potential donors and their medical teams shape these decisions. It focuses on the communication that happens during transplant evaluation and on helping African American donors weigh genetic testing for kidney-disease risk.
Why it matters
Patients with chronic or end-stage kidney disease, particularly Black patients waiting for a transplant, could gain better access to living-donor kidney transplants if transplant providers communicated more effectively. This is an efficient place to intervene, because a single transplant physician evaluates more than 100 candidates each year. A culturally tailored decision tool could also help African American potential donors make informed choices about APOL1 genetic testing and protect their own safety.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Ilene Hollin
Temple University, PA·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
Describe quality-of-life priorities and how they shape decisions among patients and caregivers at each phase of lung transplant, and among clinicians, using semi-structured interviews.
Daniel Brennan
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Medicine & Clinical Research
Determine how donor APOL1 genotype affects time to graft failure, kidney function decline, acute rejection and proteinuria in recipients of kidneys from African American donors.
Arthur Matas
University of Minnesota, MN·Medicine & Clinical Research
Compare the long-term risk of end-stage kidney disease (ESKD, kidney failure requiring dialysis or transplant) and death between living kidney donors and healthy matched controls from the Rochester Epidemiology Project, with over 40 years of follow-up.
The school
Temple University: 22 labs on PI Pages, $315M a year on research, 238 research doctorates a year.
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