The overarching goal of the Patient Advisory Committee (PAC) is to ensure that the proposed research is relevant to patients with kidney disease and their care partners.  The PAC assembling will aim for representation in multiple areas of kidney disease, including CKD, AKI and ESKD across all of the National Resource Centers. We will attempt to maximize diversity (e.g., age, sex and sexual orientation, and race/ethnicity) and ensure the representativeness and outreach of the committee. We will ask patients to serve two-year terms, renewable based on their engagement and proposed metrics of evaluation.
Specific objectives of the PAC include:

• Conduct patient focus groups to gather feedback on themes that patients and care partners view as important to patients with kidney disease yielding adequate thematic saturation
• Provide the investigators with information on possible new research directions
• Provide feedback on the overall direction of the O’Brien consortium and individual NRCs
• Provide feedback on opportunity pool recipients’ applications and implementation processes
• Support panel discussions with early-stage investigators