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Shweta Bansal, MBBS, MD, FASN

Professor of Medicine

Dr. Bansal joined the Division of Nephrology at UT Health San Antonio in 2010 after obtaining medical degree from SMS Medical College, India and Nephrology Fellowship from the University of Colorado, Denver.  Currently, she is a clinical Professor of Medicine, and Director of Home Dialysis Program and CTSA-Hub Liaison Team. Dr. Bansal adores the pathophysiological role kidneys play in health and diseases and is passionate about teaching this role to students, patients and colleagues. She has been highly recognized for her outstanding teaching abilities and has won several teaching awards.  For patient care, Dr. Bansal strongly believes that empowerment of patients through improving health literacy is the most important step to achieve the best outcomes. She received the 2023 UT Health Presidential Award for Clinical Excellence.

Dr. Bansal’s clinical and research interests focus on the volume/sodium control in the management of hypertension, CKD, dialysis and cardiorenal patients. She has received extra-mural and institutional grants and has been the site-PI for important initiatives like TRIDENT consortium, NHLBI sponsored SPIRRIT-HF and several clinical industry grants. During her earlier career, she received pilot awards to study the role of inflammation to regulate FGF23 in CKD. She has over 90 peer-reviewed publications and chapters in high-impact journals such as Annals of Internal Medicine and JASN and has been regularly invited as faculty speaker at national and international conferences. She serves as the Associate Editor for Journal Clinical Nephrology, Journal of clinical and translational sciences, and editorial board member for several nephrology and cardiology journals.  She leads the Hub Liaison Team for Institutional Clinical and Translational Sciences Award. In this role, she has been active developing strategies to ensure efficient and timely conduct of clinical trials with effective recruitment at her Institute, dissemination and implementation of the TIN resources bidirectionally, and trialists workforce development, etc. She also served as the chair of the Institutional Review Board for 8 years.

Dr. Bansal established the home dialysis program using a multi-disciplinary team approach in 2011. By providing opportunities to learn and practice home dialysis to the fellows, she has been addressing the issue of shortage of home dialysis competent nephrologists, one of the main barriers for low uptake of this modality. Her participation as the councilor of ISPD-NAC, member of ASN - Home Dialysis task force and HDU faculty allows addressing the workforce shortage at the national level and have an impact at the policy level. However, she identifies herself more as a kidney protector than a dialysis provider, and on that line, she started a prevention clinic for early CKD in 2011, and as of lately, has been developing a kidney care prevention pathway utilizing EHR best practice alert capabilities.  Dr. Bansal took over the role of program director (2017-2021) of a struggling nephrology fellowship, while the program was matching zero fellows. Establishing “change the status-quo in nephrology”, as the motto of the program, she revamped it by developing new curriculums, offering multiple tracks collaborating with other divisions, departments at the institute and private practice in the town, improving the education-service balance, and restructuring conferences organization etc. Moreover, Dr. Bansal, co-founded and has been directing annual cardiorenal connections symposium, a conglomeration of all of her clinical, research and education efforts in cardiorenal area, since 2015 to bring together clinicians, nurses, dieticians, researchers, and industry to address the challenges in management of patients with concomitant heart, kidney and metabolic diseases. It has gained international recognition over the years.  

Overall, Dr. Bansal strongly believes in academic medicine and its each domain – patient care, education, and research. She is humbled and privileged to have the current job that allows her to have a meaningful impact on the lives of her patients through clinical care and research activities, and the lives of medical students, residents, and fellows through teaching.