Dr. Amy D. Waterman is a national transplant innovator and the Deborah C. and Clifton B. Phillips Centennial Chair for Clinical Research in Transplant Medicine, a Full Professor, and the Director of Patient Engagement, Diversity, and Education, representing both J.C. Walter Transplant Center at Houston Methodist Hospital and the Houston Methodist Research Institute. In addition to many national transplant leadership positions, Dr. Waterman is a Fellow of the American Society of Transplantation. In 2018, she received the ClearMark Award of Distinction from the Center for Plain Language for her interactive digital application, My Transplant Coach, as well as a National Health Information Merit Award for two educational initiatives developed by Explore Transplant, a nonprofit consortium Dr. Waterman founded.
Dr. Waterman is driven by three beliefs:
- transplant-eligible kidney patients deserve to make informed choices about their treatment options, especially deceased and living donor transplantation;
- there are many generous people who might become deceased and living kidney donors, but they need to learn what donation involves;
- if we all work together – kidney patients, their families and communities and kidney healthcare professionals – our collaborative efforts can reduce the national kidney donor shortage and increase the number of people living longer with the benefit of kidney transplants.
The Patient Engagement Research Lab focuses on understanding critical, modifiable patient, provider, and system factors that influence deceased and living donor kidney transplant rates, and designing solutions to improve them. For both adult and pediatric patients, Dr. Waterman’s research examines how best to expand access to transplant, support informed treatment decisions, promote transplant follow-through, encourage paired donation, and increase living donation rates.
Her research spans a wide range of clinical and translational studies, including patient-focused research, clinical trials, behavioral science, educational tool development, cost-effectiveness analyses, health outcomes research, and the implementation of proven strategies into routine clinical care. The lab emphasizes putting research findings into practice through partnerships with healthcare providers, national transplant leaders, and healthcare policymakers.
Dr. Waterman collaborates with and mentors researchers in nephrology, urology, health services, economics, public health, and nursing who have expertise in transplantation or healthcare education. Her research has been supported by more than $25 million in federal grants, and she has authored over 80 research articles and book chapters.
Dr. Waterman earned her PhD in Social Psychology with a focus on patient education and behavior change from Washington University in St. Louis, where she served as Associate Professor of Medicine at the School of Medicine in the Department of Internal Medicine, General Medical Sciences. She spent over 12 years at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she was Professor in Residence and Deputy Director at the Terasaki Institute for Biomedical Innovation.
In 2014, she co-chaired a national workgroup for the American Society of Transplantation (AST) Consensus Conference on Best Practices in Live Kidney Donation, which produced recommendations for improving transplant education. Since then, she has published and shared these findings across the U.S., Canada, and Singapore. In 2015, she co-chaired the End-Stage Renal Disease Access to Kidney Transplantation Technical Expert Panel (TEP) for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), and was inducted into the first class of AST Fellows (FAST). She currently participates in AST’s Psychosocial Community of Practice (COP), Living Donor COP, and Health COP.
Dr. Waterman also leads the design and evaluation of educational tools for patients and potential living donors, including brochures, videos, mobile apps, social media content, and provider-led interventions that encourage transplant consideration and living donation. In response to growing national demand for these tools, she founded the nonprofit educational programs Explore Transplant and Explore Living Donation in 2009, expanding the reach of transplant education across the U.S. and Canada. Over half of the nation’s 6,000 dialysis centers have participated in more than 120 Explore Transplant provider trainings, helping deliver transplant education to 28,000 dialysis patients across the U.S. and 40,000 in Ontario, Canada.
In 2016, Dr. Waterman was invited to the White House Organ Donation Summit as a keynote speaker to support the launch of the United Network for Organ Sharing’s (UNOS) Kidney Transplant Learning Center. She led a panel of kidney and transplant organizations, researchers, and education specialists that developed a national online hub of transplant learning resources, launched in early 2018.