Background:
I am at Cedars-Sinai Guerin Children’s Hospital and the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. I have been at Cedars-Sinai for 35 years and affiliated with UCLA for 49! I did my pediatric training at the wonderful Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh followed by a clinical pediatric nephrology fellowship at UCLA and a research fellowship in Renal Immunopathology at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center. After being the division director and fellowship program director at Cedars-Sinai for many years, I partially retired and work as the Cedars-Sinai principal investigator for multiple clinical trials in glomerular diseases. I fell in love with the immunopathology of glomerular diseases as a resident so there was no way that I was going to retire and miss all the fun of seeing novel therapies come into the clinical arena!
Clinical & Research Interests:
As a pediatric nephrologist I share the experience of most of the colleagues from my era of being immersed in all things pediatric nephrology – dialysis, kidney transplant, neonatal kidney injury, CAKUT, genetic kidney diseases, all things nephrotic, glomerular diseases, and long-term care of our chronically ill patients and their families over decades. I have done some research in most of these areas, but most of my research is in clinical aspects of glomerular diseases. (Though as a fellow I worked in a rat and rabbit model of membranous nephropathy. The rats got their revenge however as I developed a bad allergy to rats. I had to premedicate with antihistamines and nasal steroids to get through the experiments). I have been on the Board of Nephcure for over 15 years.
Biggest Accomplishment in the Past Year:
Establishing and successfully enrolling several patients in clinical trials – with the help of our wonderful regional pediatric nephrology community. Personally, a great accomplishment has been to keep up with being a grandmother to 6 grandchildren who all live outside of Los Angeles. Christmas and Thanksgiving at our house is always a treat!
What You Love about Your Job:
Being able to have long relationships with the patients and their families, watching them grow up and flourish. It’s been especially wonderful when we can work as a team to develop the best care possible, and then when we can apply new treatments as they become available.
Fun Fact:
I am a very amateur “slow birder.” I fell in love with birds on our first trip to Africa (we have been 8 times!) and I love watching them. We have several bird feeders in our yard, and we even went on one of those crazy birding trips to Texas during the Spring Migration. My current favorite is the Goliath Heron!
Social Media:
I dropped off Twitter when the ownership changed but am on (very infrequently) Bluesky, Facebook (good way to keep up with grown-up patients), and Instagram as forresterdoc1.
Author: Emily Zangla, DO
