New Faculty

Dr. Frank J. O’Brien

Frank J. O’Brien, MBBCh, MRCPI, joined the Department of Medicine as an Assistant Professor in the Division of Nephrology at Washington University School of Medicine on July 1, 2017. His clinical work includes nephrology consult, dialysis and general medicine. His educational responsibilities include teaching and supervision of medical students, residents, house staff and fellows.

Dr. O’Brien earned his medical degree, with first-class honors, from University College Cork in 2006. He completed his residency in internal medicine and higher specialty training in nephrology at the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland as well as transplant specialty training at Beaumont Hospital in Dublin. He then completed a fellowship in nephrology at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.

Dr. O’Brien’s main research interests focus on dialysis and acute kidney injury. His research focuses on identifying better markers to assess dialysis adequacy and finding more accurate techniques to predict the need for dialysis in acute kidney injury.

He is the recipient of multiple awards, including the Transplant Medal, Dialysis Medal and the Vincent Dolan Memorial Medal from the Irish Nephrology Society. He also received an award for Outstanding Clinical Research from the University of California San Diego Young Investigator Forum in 2017.

From 2016-2017, Dr. O’Brien was a Jack and Marion Euphrat Pediatric Translational Medicine Fellow at the Child Health Research Institute at Stanford. He received a fellowship grant for his project assessment of dialysis efficacy in pediatric patients. The goal of the project was to investigate the extent to which uremic solutes are elevated in the plasma of pediatric dialysis patients by assessing dialysis kinetics and solute generation.