Dr. Rohit Loomba is a Professor of Medicine, Director of Hepatology, and Chief of the liver service line at the University of California at San Diego(UCSD). He is an internationally recognized thought leader in translational research and innovative, clinical trial design in NASH, and non-invasive assessment of liver disease using advanced imaging modalities. Dr. Loomba is the founding director of the UCSD NAFLD Research Center, which is one of the most well-funded clinical and translational research programs at UCSD. The NAFLD Research Center fosters collaborative science in which a multi-disciplinary team of researchers conducts research in NAFLD including development of-invasive biomarkers, genetics, epidemiology, clinical trial design, imaging endpoints, and integrated OMICs using microbiome, metabolome and lipidome. This integrated approach has led to several innovative applications such as establishment of MRI-PDFF as a non-invasive biomarker of treatment response in early phase trials in NASH, which has now been adopted in more than 100 clinical trials conducted worldwide. He holds several patents on non-invasive biomarkers of NASH and fibrosis.
His research is funded by the National Institutes of Health as a Principal Investigator including two R01s, three U01 (two NIDDK and one from NIAAA), clinical core director of P30 (NIDDK), and project director P01 (NHLBI) grant mechanisms, Foundation of NIH, as well as several large multicenter, multi-million dollar investigator initiated research projects funded by the industry. He is the Principal Investigator, UCSD, for the NIDDK-sponsored NASH Clinical Research Network and the Liver Cirrhosis Network. He served as the elected Chair of the NAFLD, Special Interest Group of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases. He also serves as on the Scientific Advisory Board of numerous biotechnology and large pharmaceutical companies and guides clinical drug development and biomarker discovery programs globally.
He serves on the Editorial Board of Gastroenterology, Journal of Hepatology, Gut, and Nature Reviews in Gastroenterology and Hepatology. He recently completed a 5-year term as the Deputy Editor of Hepatology, the official journal of the AASLD. Currently, he serves as the co-Editor of Alimentary Pharmacology and Therapeutics, an international journal in the field of gastroenterology and hepatology. Dr. Loomba has published more than 425 papers and has an H-index of 115. He has been listed among the top 1% of the globally highly cited scientists across all fields from 2019–2022 by Web of Science. He is an elected member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation (ASCI), and the Association of American Physicians (AAP).