It is both a pleasure and an honor, as well as a daunting task, to introduce Stewart Cameron for the Jean Hamburger Award. Stewart, after all, is the reason I am a nephrologist. It is difficult to summarize Stewart's contribution to nephrology over the past 40 years because he has influenced its development in so many ways. Stewart Cameron is first and foremost an outstanding clinical scientist whose work changed the way we think about glomerulonephritis. He is a predigious author, not only on research papers, but also of reviews and books for fellow researchers, for nephrologists, and for patients. He has been a phenomenal teacher and educator who has mentored more than 250 research fellows from all over the world. His global contacts have led him to travel extensively—indeed, he is his own one-man COMGAN. Stewart is also a politician (although he wouldn't appreciate being called one), at least in the sense of leader who has been past president not only of the ISN but also of ERA/EDTA and the European Society for Pediatric Nephrologists, two of the other organizations who have joined the ISN in this World Congress. Finally, Stewart Cameron is an active historian of nephrology, helping us to understand the present through the work of great and forgotten figures from the past. Above all, however, Stewart Cameron is an enthusiast.

Stewart Cameron was born in Aberdeen, Scotland in 1934 and had his early education there. While at secondary school, he moved to Ealing in London where his father worked in the nascent British film industry. In 1953, Stewart went to Guy's Hospital Medical School, where very unusually for that time, in addition to his medical training, he took an intercalated science degree, which he completed with first-class honors. He qualified in Medicine in 1959 and had already decided he wanted a career in research. He rapidly completed his initial clinical appointments and moved on to become a Junior Lecturer at Guy's in 1962.

Stewart Cameron's early research training was greatly influenced by John Butterfield, the then Professor of Experimental Medicine at Guy's, whose group were just then discovering the phenomenon of microalbuminuria in diabetes. Stewart worked on glucose metabolism and insulin binding in rat models, as well as in clinical and epidemiologic studies. These experiences laid the foundations for his subsequent research career, but also left him certain that he wanted to pursue research primarily on patients rather than rodents.

Nephrology was in its infancy as a specialty and there were very few renal units in the United Kingdom, so when Stewart decided to become a nephrologist, it was natural that he should go to the United States to learn. In 1962, he obtained a Fulbright Fellowship to work in Robert Pitts' department at Cornell University Medical College where he worked as a clinical fellow for E. Lovell Becker and received clinical and research training. It was there that he developed his interest in glomerulonephritis, which has been his primary (but by no means exclusive) research interest.

In 1963, Stewart returned to London to establish the renal unit at Guy's Hospital and shortly afterward he took charge of the nascent pediatric nephrology unit at Guy's as well. Over the next 10 years, he developed an academic renal unit that provided not only superb patient care but also the resource for his subsequent research. He was joined in this enterprise by his long-term colleague Chisholm Ogg.

Stewart's principal research focus at this time was glomerulonephritis and, in a series of seminal papers throughout the 1970s and 1980s, his work transformed the clinical understanding of glomerulonephritis. Clinical case studies of patients with glomerulonephritis had started at Guy's a century and a half earlier with studies of Richard Bright and it had perhaps reached its peak with the work of Thomas Addis and Jean Olivier in the 1940s. The work thus far was based on autopsy studies of individual patients, but the advent of renal biopsies meant that for the first time collections of nephritic patients with similar morphologic appearances in their kidneys could be studied prospectively and this required a fundamentally new approach. Pathologists began to develop increasingly sophisticated classifications, especially after the introduction of immunofluorescence and clinicopathologic papers began to appear from many units. Despite this, it is fair to say that Stewart "invented" the modern concept of a clinicopathologic study.

These studies were based on four principles: (1) the collection of large cohorts of personally studied patients; (2) precise definition of these patients morphologically, functionally, and clinically; (3) long-term follow-up of the patient usage groups standard practices; and, equally important; and (4) the use of appropriate statistical analysis. Stewart introduced the use of the Kaplan-Meyer life tables and Venn diagrams into the study of patients with renal disease. In a series of seminal papers, he defined the natural history of all the major types of glomerulonephritis. Stewart was also first to demonstrate that steroid responsiveness, rather than fine details of morphology, determined the outcome in minimal change nephritic syndrome. He was also first to show that the severity of proteinuria, rather than renal morphology, determined prognosis. His work demonstrated the importance of interstitial inflammation in patients with glomerular disease and identified the prominence of T cells in the interstitial infiltrate. He was also highly innovative in his approach to treatment, especially in patients with more aggressive forms of nephritis, including systemic lupus. Although glomerular disease has been the central focus of Stewart's research, his interests have extended far beyond it. They include disorders of purine metabolism, acute and chronic renal failure, and renal transplantation.

Stewart Cameron has also made an enormous contribution to the development of renal research in other ways. He has mentored researchers from throughout the globe and sustained these relationships after they had returned home, both through correspondence and by visiting them. Stewart has always been a prodigious traveler and this emphasizes his role in the global advancement of nephrology. He was President of the 1987 ISN International Congress in Nephrology and, in his opening address, spoke of the ISN's duty to develop nephrology throughout the world and to bring clinical services to developing countries. He continued the internationalist approach during his term as ISN President and encouraged Dr. Schrier, his successor as ISN President and co-recipient of the 2003 Jean Hamburger award, to establish ISN-COMGAN.

Throughout all these achievements, Stewart has been enormously supported by his wife Margot who has travelled almost as far and is almost as well known to nephrologists as he is. Stewart is a self-confessed butterfly, always interested in many things. It has been nephrology's gain that he has been so and has touched an enormous number of projects and left all of them much the richer. And so, Stewart, it has been a real honor to introduce you as a recipient of the Jean Hamburger Award.