My goal is to understand molecular mechanisms of insulin action, insulin resistance, and endothelial dysfunction as they relate to diabetes, obesity and their cardiovascular complications. My work covers five broad areas that are mutually informative: 1) complexity and specificity of insulin signaling, 2) metabolic actions of insulin, 3) vascular actions of insulin, 4) clinical physiology of metabolic and cardiovascular homeostasis, 5) novel therapeutic approaches for diabetes, obesity, and their cardiovascular complications.We employ approaches spanning molecular and cellular biology, physiology, mathematical modeling, and patient-oriented clinical investigation. We pioneered the hypothesis that insulin-stimulated production of nitric oxide (NO) in vascular endothelium couples metabolic and vascular physiology. This determines reciprocal relationships between insulin resistance and endothelial dysfunction caused by imbalance between PI 3-kinase- and MAP-kinase-dependent insulin signaling pathways. This explains, in part, how insulin resistance couples vascular and metabolic pathophysiology. Thus, therapeutic strategies to improve metabolic actions of insulin simultaneously improve endothelial function and vice versa.Over the past 30 years, trainees (MD, MD/PhD, PhD) in my lab have gone on to independent careers in academic research and/or clinical settings. Moreover, I have trained many undergraduate, graduate, and medical students who have worked their way up the academic ladder to tenure-track faculty positions and beyond at outstanding programs at Stanford, UCSF, UT Southwestern, University of Alabama Birmingham, and other excellent institutions in the USA and abroad (Korea, Sweden, Italy, etc.). I garnered several mentoring awards from the American Diabetes Association and I was given the NIH Director’s Mentor Award in 2004 (awarded annually to only 1 out of ~1000 intramural NIH principal investigator scientists). My >214 peer-reviewed papers have > 38,000 citations and I have an H-index of 93.
Listed skills include Diabetes, Endocrinology, Medical Research, Translational Research, and 46 others.
