Dr Alfred Kim is Associate Professor of Medicine at Washington University School of Medicine where he directs the Lupus Center, which he founded in 2013. He also directs the Biobanking and Phenotyping Core within the NIH/NIAMS P30-funded Rheumatic Diseases Research Resource-based Center, is a Faculty Scholar at the Institute of Public Health, and serves as Associate Program Director for the Rheumatology Fellowship Program, all at Washington University. Additionally, he is Chief Medical Officer at Kypha, Inc., an innate immune diagnostics company.
Dr Kim obtained a BA in Biochemistry from the University of Pennsylvania and MD and PhD from Drexel University College of Medicine. He completed his clinical training in Internal Medicine and Rheumatology at Barnes-Jewish Hospital/Washington University School of Medicine, where he was part of the Physician-Scientist Training Program performing his post-doctoral fellowship with Dr Andrey Shaw on the pathologic contributions of B cells in podocyte dysfunction.
He currently runs a research group focusing on translational and clinical questions surrounding human SLE. Dr Kim also initiated the COVID-19 Vaccine Responses in Patients with Autoimmune Diseases (COVaRiPAD) study, which seeks to elucidate the strength, quality, durability, evolution, and safety of COVID-19 vaccine responses in patients taking immunosuppressives for autoimmune diseases. He is Co-Investigator for the Lupus Research Alliance’s Lupus Nexus study, a multicenter, international effort to collect clinical data and biospecimens from over 3000 patients with SLE.
Dr Kim serves as Chair of the Impact Advisory Council at the Rheumatology Research Foundation and is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board at the Lupus Research Alliance, OMERACT SLE Working Group, Lupus Nephritis Trials Network (LNTN), Lupus Clinical Investigator Network (LuCIN), and Clinical and the Scientific Committee of the COVID-19 Global Rheumatology Alliance. He serves on the Strategic Planning Task Force for the ACR, Scientific Advisory Council at the Rheumatology Research Foundation, and Early Career Investigators Subcommittee within the Committee of Research of the ACR.