Expert Witness
Clinical Authority
Dr. Grubbs brings more than fifteen years of clinical practice as a board-certified nephrologist and internist to every matter she accepts. She practiced nephrology at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital as a UCSF faculty member where she directly applied, and deliberately departed from, the race-corrected eGFR standard that is the subject of her testimony. Her double board certification in internal medicine and nephrology, combined with an MPH in epidemiology, gives her the rare capacity to speak with equal authority to clinical standard of care, population-level harm, and research methodology.
The eGFR Record
Dr. Grubbs was among the earliest nephrologists to sound the alarm on harm caused by race-based correction factors in eGFR equations. She began calling out the issue on the first day of her nephrology fellowship in 2007. Her concerns were dismissed. But she persisted.
She documented what she was seeing at the bedside in her memoir Hundreds of Interlaced Fingers (Amistad, 2017) — including the case of a Black male patient whose transplant referral she deliberately made two years earlier than the race-corrected equation would have permitted, using her own clinical judgment to override a standard she had already identified as racially biased. She brought the argument to a public stage in her TEDxSF talk. She made the scientific case in the peer-reviewed literature, including in a 2020 editorial in the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology — "Precision in GFR Reporting: Let's Stop Playing the Race Card" — calling directly on the field to eliminate the race coefficient.
The field resisted. In 2021, Dr. Grubbs co-authored the quantitative analysis establishing that an estimated 31,000 additional Black patients had been excluded from kidney transplant waitlist eligibility as a direct result of the race coefficient — published in EClinicalMedicine and widely cited in subsequent reform efforts. Work she co-authored contributed directly to the formation of the NKF/ASN Task Force that formally eliminated the race-based correction that same year.
She did not follow the field. The field followed her.
Communication and Public Scholarship
Expert witness testimony requires translating complex medical science into language that judges, juries, and opposing counsel can engage with precisely and without distortion. Dr. Grubbs has spent her career doing exactly that — in peer-reviewed journals including The Lancet, the New England Journal of Medicine, and the American Journal of Kidney Diseases; in two books published by major houses for general audiences; and in national media including STAT News and The Boston Globe. She has testified before lay and professional audiences alike on race, medicine, and the mechanisms by which clinical algorithms cause population-level harm. She has been retained as an expert witness in federal litigation and has provided testimony in prior matters.
Retention
Dr. Grubbs accepts a limited number of expert witness engagements. She is available for case review, written opinion, deposition, and trial testimony in matters involving nephrology standard of care, race-based clinical algorithms, kidney transplant access, and health equity. Compensation is available upon inquiry.
To discuss retention, contact:
Please include case jurisdiction, subject matter, and estimated timeline in your initial inquiry.