Renara is a submission to the KidneyX EMPOWER Living Link Prize Challenge - a $4M federal prize challenge run by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the American Society of Nephrology to support living kidney donors and expand the donor pool.
Living kidney donation has been flat at ~7,000 donors per year for two decades. Roughly half of would-be donors never finish the process - and the most common reasons are modifiable: body weight, blood pressure, smoking, and unanswered fear about the surgery and long-term outcomes. None of those are clinical mysteries. They are execution problems.
Renara is a tool for the gap between “wants to donate” and “completes the donation.” It coaches donors through the eligibility criteria their center requires, answers the outcome questions most donors are afraid to ask out loud, and surfaces the financial protections most donors do not know they qualify for. Every clinical claim is cited. Eligibility decisions stay with the transplant team.
The NKF Peer Mentor program matches prospective donors with people who have been through donation themselves. Renara is the structured, citation-grounded layer: the daily plan, the evidence-based answers, the financial tools, the coordinator summary. The lived-experience layer is what NKF provides, and we route donors there explicitly - through the Donor Companion when they express anxiety, and through the dashboard's financial & peer support panel. The two are complements, not substitutes.
Three people. Clinical data, enterprise architecture, and computational biomedical research. Every credential lands in a part of the work.
Computational biomedical research (single-cell RNA-seq, imaging mass cytometry, deep learning) in the Mohan Lab at the University of Houston. Published abstracts in JASN; presented at ASN Kidney Week. Co-author on a Journal of Nutrition LAMs/scRNA-seq submission and an editorial in Child Psychiatry and Human Development.
Research Assistant, University of Houston Department of Biomedical Engineering.
MIT, Artificial Intelligence and Physics (Class of 2030). Member of the 2025 U.S. Physics Team and Team USA at the International Olympiad in AI (IOAI) in 2024 and 2025 (bronze, 2025). First author of TRIMS (FR-OR015) - deep-learning segmentation of renal tubules and immune cells in 32-marker spatial proteomic images of lupus nephritis biopsies - presented as one of four U.S. speakers in ASN's 2025 AI session at Kidney Week.
Research Assistant, University of Houston Department of Biomedical Engineering.
PhD in Microbiology and Immunology, LSU Health Sciences Center. SAS Certified Clinical Trial Programmer and Base Programmer. CDISC SDTM/ADaM and FDA-regulated study design. Coursera credentials from UCSD (Drug Development) and Johns Hopkins (Clinical Trials).
Principal Analyst, Clinical Data Analytics at Cytel. Previously Statistics/Programming at IQVIA.
EMPOWER is a $4M federal prize challenge from HHS and the American Society of Nephrology - the latest in a public-private partnership running since 2018. It targets the friction points in the living donor journey across five focus areas: public awareness and mentorship, donor readiness, donor interventions, center practices, and post-donation outcomes.
Renara answers all five - not as five separate tools, but as one companion that follows a single donor across the whole arc. Cited information and peer mentorship at the start; a deterministic readiness plan and financial protections in the middle; a coordinator console and post-donation tracking that flags anomalies to the center at the end. The challenge closes June 15, 2026.
The model is to license Renara to transplant centers. Each program configures its own eligibility criteria into one transparent, auditable engine; donors, coordinators, and peer mentors all work in the same connected tool. We are in conversation with Baylor College of Medicine about a pilot under IRB approval - the path to measuring what matters most: whether a connected, donor-centered tool keeps more would-be donors from dropping out. If it retains even one more donor, it has saved a life.
Statutory authority: 15 U.S.C. 3719 (America COMPETES Act). Coordinator and mentor consoles shown in the app are working prototypes seeded with demo data.