Diabetes Awareness Month Research Forum
To mark November as Diabetes Awareness Month, the Stanford Diabetes Research Center (SDRC) organizes a Diabetes Research Forum each year. The third iteration of this series was held on Nov 28th, 2018 at the Berg Hall in Li Ka Shing Center. The Diabetes Research Forum is a day-long symposium with presentations from Pilot and Feasibility (P&F) award winners. 90 members from within the center, including faculty members, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows attended this year. Keynote was delivered by Dr. Qizhi Tang, Director of Islet Transplantion Research Laboratory at University of California, San Francisco. She talked about the stress islets face post transplantation and strategies to reduce the burden on such newly transplanted islets. Dr. Seung Kim, Director of SDRC, provided updates on the activities of the center and thanked all members for active participation.
The 2018 P&F awardees presented updates on their progress so far and received valuable feedback from members of the diabetes research community. Dr. H. Tom Soh put it aptly: “The pilot funding from SDRC has enabled our technology to be translated to the field of diabetes”. Indeed, the pilot funding has enabled several transdisciplinary and innovative partnerships! Dr. Rick Kraemer, Director of the P&F program talked about how the P30 center designation and institutional support has been critical in supporting these seed grants. It was exciting to see the breadth of projects that have been funded in the last 3 years since the center has been formed. This year 8 awards have been granted and each of the awardees presented their proposed work that will begin in January 2019. Dr. Sun H. Kim, one of the awardees stated that the pilot funding will be critical in her project to generate the data required for seeking extramural funding!