Moonwalk Team

Dr. Rohit Loomba is a Professor of Medicine (with tenure), Chief, Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, at the University of California at San Diego. He is an internationally recognized thought leader in translational research and innovative clinical trial design in nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), and non-invasive assessment of liver disease using advanced imaging modalities.

Dr. Loomba is the founding director of the UCSD MASLD Research Center, which fosters collaborative team science where a multi-disciplinary team of researchers are conducting cutting edge research in all aspects of NAFLD including non-invasive biomarkers, genetics, epidemiology, clinical trial design, imaging end-points, 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 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 500 manuscripts and has an H-index of 131. He has been consistently listed among the top 1% of the globally highly cited scientists across all fields since 2019 by Web of Science. He is an elected member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation (ASCI), and the Association of American Physicians (AAP).