Expertise of Renate Kain

About Renate Kain

Renate Kain, WP3 lead and coordinator of the renal node, Univ.-Prof. Dr.med.univ. PhD, Head of Department, Full Professor of Pathology, has 114 publications (H-index 27, RG).

Renate Kain received her medical training at the University of Vienna. She is an expert renal histopathologist and trained clinical microbiologist with a special interest in small vessel vasculitis and extensive expertise in cell biology, biochemistry, immunology and glycobiology. She obtained her PhD from the University of Aberdeen working on proteomic analysis of antigenic targets in autoimmunity in the world class proteomics department. Her research focuses on exploring basic disease mechanisms in autoimmunity using small vessel vasculitis as model system and translating the finding to the clinical setting of the disease.

Expertise

The renal pathology and immunology research group, led by Renate Kain within the Department has an unrivalled reputation for ultrastructural and biological cell studies of the kidney in health and disease and made important contributions to recent advances in the understanding of severe (auto)immunulogical and renal diseases, such as membranous nephropathy, vasculitis and transplant rejection.

As Head of the Department of Pathology she actively promotes novel developments like digital pathology and has developed the infrastructure for scanning and annotating clinical case series and linking them to clinical data sets in the MedUni Vienna’s Research, Documentation and Analysis (RDA) platform for clinical and translational studies.

She is partner in the Infrastructural project co-ordinated by MUG for digital pathology that links the Pathologies of the Medical Universities of Graz, Innsbruck and Vienna and the Veterinay University Vienna Austria (“Interuniversitäre Infrastruktur für digitale Pathologie”) funded through the Austrian Ministry of Sciences. Training in Digital Pathology is actively promoted through a dedicated image analysis training school held jointly with the University Nottingham in Vienna.

Renate has several years expertise in managing an independent research laboratory funded through external grant income and coordinated the EC funded projects INTRICATE 261382 and RELENT 668036 and is partner in the ITN HELICAL (http://helical-itn.eu/about/) designed to prepare the next generation of health informatics researchers.