About me
Carla Avesani is a senior researcher specialist at CLINTEC, Division of Renal Medicine, Baxter Novum, and Associate Professor in Nutrition at Karolinska Institutet. Her training started as Renal Dietitian in Brazil, where she obtained her PhD in 2004 with the thesis Resting energy expenditure and body composition in patients with chronic kidney disease at the Federal University of Sao Paulo (main supervisors Lilian Cuppari and Sergio Antonio Draibe). Later in 2005-2006 she had her post-doc training at Karolinska Institutet (supervisors Bengt Lindholm and Peter Stenvinkel). In 2010 she became Associate Professor at Rio de Janeiro State University, Brazil and in 2018 she reallocated to Sweden where she has been working at Karolinska Institutet in the study line Food as medicine in chronic kidney disease in the research group from Peter Stenvinkel and Bengt Lindholm.
Her focus of research is on how nutrition can improve the clinical condition of patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD). Her studies have been used in Guidelines to construct evidence-based nutrition practices from different academic societies. Her studies include investigations of tools for the assessment of nutritional status and body composition; the assessment of the role of dietary patterns in the prognosis of quality of life, hospitalization events, and mortality, and more recently, in clinical trials exploring the role of plant-based diet and nutrients on mitigating metabolic derangements inherent to chronic kidney disease. She is also involved in two ERASMUS+ projects: GoodREnal project (http://goodrenal.eu/) and ePlanet (http://eplanet.care/). The first aims to provide education to patients, caregivers, and health care professionals working in the field of CKD, and the second to include microlearning on planetary health in the curriculum of medical students of KI and of other 4 European universities.
Her Hirsch index is 23. She has published around 85 peer-reviewed papers in the field of nutrition with a focus on nephrology.
She participates on the board of academic journals in the field of Nutrition and CKD and was elected as Vice-Chair of the European Renal Nutrition Working Group from the European Renal Society for the term 2022-2024.