About Us

Key Leadership

Leigh Reynolds, KidneyWise Executive Director: 
Leigh Reynolds brings a wealth of experience to KidneyWise having served the non-profit arena in an executive capacity for more nearly two decades. Most recently Reynolds worked as National Director of Special Events at the PKD Foundation. Prior to PKD, Reynolds was Vice President of Development of the National MS Society.

Reynolds gained the expertise of knowing how to motivate large numbers of volunteers for a cause, and brings this energy to the KidneyWise mission of re-thinking prevention of chronic kidney disease.

No stranger to chronic kidney disease, Reynolds herself became a kidney donor in 2008 when a friend and volunteer from the PKD Foundation was in need.

Dr. Carolyn Smith-Morris, Medical Anthropologist
Dr. Carolyn Smith-Morris is a leading scholar in the science behind the KidneyWise approach to the prevention of chronic kidney disease.

Dr. Smith-Morris has authored a critical study of diabetes among the Pima Indians living in the Gila River Indian Community, which has made important contributions to our understanding and preventing of the disease. She is also a leading scholar on the social and cultural contexts of chronic disease with work in the U.S. and Mexico on social capital, structural and economic factors in disease, and community-based research and prevention.

Currently Smith-Morris is an associate professor of anthropology at Southern Methodist University teaching several courses in the field.

Fighting CKD Is In Our Genes

Founded in 1982, our parent organization, the PKD Foundation, a 501(c) (3) 509 (a)(1) public charity located in Kansas City, Missouri, is an internationally recognized leader in the fight against chronic kidney disease, focused on the leading genetic cause, polycystic kidney disease (PKD). Through community development and engagement, advocacy and awareness, the PKD Foundation has combined the passion of the 12.5 million people affected by PKD with hundreds of organizations worldwide to create a powerful force dedicated to research in PKD. In 2008, the PKD Foundation organized KidneyWise in response to the growing need of more than 50 million Americans affected by CKD for the same innovative approach to catalyzing the “crowd” to prevent CKD.