-SDRC Leadership-

CENTER DIRECTOR

Seung K. Kim is the KM Mulberry Professor in the Department of Developmental Biology and, by courtesy, in the Department of Medicine (Endocrinology, Gerontology & Metabolism) and the Department of Pediatrics (Endocrinology) at Stanford University School of Medicine, where he has been a faculty member since 1998. He received his undergraduate degree in Biochemical Sciences from Harvard University in 1985, then his M.D. and Ph.D. from the Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP) at Stanford University School of Medicine in 1992. From 1992 to 1994, Dr. Kim was a resident physician in the Department of Internal Medicine at the Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston. Dr. Kim served from 1994 to 1997 as a Medical Oncology Fellow and Instructor at Harvard Medical School and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Research Fellow at Harvard University from 1995-1998. 

In recognition of his achievements, Dr. Kim has received multiple awards, including selection in 2008 as an Investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Gerald and Kayla Grodsky Basic Science Research Award from the JDRF in 2013, and in the Ho-Am Prize in Medicine in 2014. Dr. Kim is also an award-winning teacher and mentor who has contributed to science education in multiple ways in secondary school, undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate training programs over the past 24 years. For 14 years, from 2000 to 2013, he served as co-director or director of the Stanford MSTP, overseeing the dual MD/PhD training of hundreds of students. He is a past recipient of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation Award for Excellence in Teaching, and the Faculty Award for Excellence in Mentoring and Service in the Biosciences Graduate Programs at Stanford University School of Medicine. Dr. Kim has served as an external advisor to the U.S. National Institutes of Health, to the Seoul National University School of Medicine, and multiple private Foundations and Trusts, including the JDRF, and the Harry and Leona Helmsley Trust. 

For over two decades, Dr. Kim has been an illuminative force and thought leader, in the vanguard of his research fields. Dr. Kim’s laboratory at Stanford has discovered new approaches to create, expand, and regenerate pancreatic islets, the tissue that makes the vital hormone insulin, which is deficient in diabetes. He and his team have isolated stem and progenitor cells from the pancreas and elucidated new molecular pathways that control expansion of pancreatic cells in normal settings or cancer. These efforts have created unprecedented opportunities for harnessing knowledge about the molecular and cellular basis of pancreatic development and growth to restore pancreas islet function and to diagnose pancreas cancers. His discoveries have generated tools and expertise needed to produce islet regeneration therapies for type 1 diabetes, to improve treatments and tests to mitigate or prevent type 2 diabetes, and to generate new diagnostic strategies for pancreas cancer.

ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR- CLINICAL SCIENCES

Dr Maahs is the Lucile Salter Packard Professor of Pediatrics at Stanford University where he is the Division Chief of Pediatric Endocrinology, Associate Chair for Academic Affairs in Pediatrics and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the School of Medicine.

Dr Maahs is a physician–scientist with over two decades of experience leading clinical and translational research to improve care and outcomes for people with type 1 diabetes. Specifically, his research has extended from epidemiologic studies to identify gaps in care to development of hypotheses to test interventions in clinical trials. His early work, supported by an NIDDK K12 then K23, focused on cardiovascular and kidney complications. His research increasingly focused on diabetes technology to improve quality of life and glycemic outcomes with an emphasis on translating this research to the clinic to reduce variability in care. He has served as an investigator and leader in landmark studies and consortia including CACTI, SEARCH, T1DX, PERL, FLEX, ECHO Diabetes, and artificial pancreas research with funding from NIDDK, NSF, Breakthrough T1D, and the Helmsley Charitable Trust. These experiences built the foundation for his current focus on translating diabetes technology into clinical practice. A central achievement is the 4T (Teamwork, Targets, Technology, Tight Control) Study, an award-winning program that successfully emphasized teamwork to integrate continuous glucose monitoring combined with remote patient monitoring to improve outcomes.  4T has translated into routine diabetes care at Stanford and is being developed via a U34/U01 mechanism to scale these findings in the T1DX Quality Improvement Consortium. This study exemplifies his operational expertise in leading multidisciplinary teams to move technology- and AI-enabled interventions from research to the clinic, while addressing disparities in access and outcomes.

Dr Maahs has held numerous leadership roles—including President and Secretary-General of the International Society of Pediatric and Adolescent Diabetes (ISPAD), Associate Director of the Stanford Diabetes Research Center (SDRC), and Associate Chair and Associate Dean roles in Academic Affairs at Stanford School of Medicine—underscoring his commitment to mentoring physician–scientists and building sustainable infrastructure that advances both science and clinical care. He has served as Editor-in-Chief of the ISPAD Guidelines and on the ADA Professional Practice Committee which writes the ADA Standards of Care. He was co-PI with Dr. Georgeanna Klingensmith on the Barbara Davis Center T32 and K12 training grants in Pediatric Endocrinology and co-author with Dr. Peter Chase on the 12th and 13th editions of Understanding Diabetes, or Pink Panther education books. He currently serves as co-PI of the Stanford T32 ‘Training Grant for Diabetes Research,’ PI of the Stanford K12 ‘Training Research Leaders in Type 1 Diabetes,” and corresponding MPI for the National K12 DiabDocs Training program.

ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR - BASIC SCIENCES

Dr. Anna Gloyn uses human genetics as a tool to understand cellular and molecular mechanisms for pancreatic beta cell failure in diabetes and related conditions. Her lab employs several different approaches, including genomics, in vitro human cell models and integrative physiology which are used to study both monogenic forms of diabetes due to rare mutations which are causal for disease through to common variants present in most of the population which increase an individual’s risk for developing diabetes.

She plays leading roles in multiple consortia for genetic discovery efforts for Type 2 diabetes and related glycemic traits including the NIDDK funded Accelerated Medicines Partnership for common metabolic disease (AMP-CMD).   She generates genetic data for the NIDDK funded Human Pancreas Analysis Project (HPAP) and the Integrated Islet Distribution Program (IIDP) where she heads up the Human Islet Genetic Initiative (HIGI).  Dr Gloyn has a long-term collaboration with Patrick MacDonald from the University of Alberta in Edmonton where she has genetically characterizes human islets from the Alberta Islet Core.  These data have been made publicly available through multiple controlled access databases including the European Genome-Phenome Atlas (EGA) and the Translational Human Pancreatic Islet Genotype Tissue-Expression Resource (TIGER), PancDB and the IIDP RDR enabling their use by multiple research groups.  She is also an MPI on the NIDDK PanKbase project which has established a centralized knowledge base of the human pancreas for diabetes research.

A major focus of her current research is on delivering precision diagnostics for all people with diabetes.  She has been on the executive committee for the Atlas of Variant Effects (AVE) since 2022 and major efforts in her lab are centered on generating catalogues of all possible variants in diabetes genes to improve diagnostic certainty following genetic testing.   Through her roles on the ClinGen Expert Review Group for Variant Curation for Monogenic Diabetes and the ClinGen/AVE Functional Data Working Group she is able to rapidly translate her research into clinical care. 

Dr Gloyn is the recipient of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) Minkowski Prize (2014), the American Diabetes Association Outstanding Scientific Achievement Award (2022) and the 2026 Transatlantic Alliance Award from the European Society of Endocrinology & Endocrine Society.  In 2025 she was elected to the UK Academy of Medical Sciences. 

She has been an active part of the Stanford Diabetes Research Center since joining the faculty here in 2020 as co-director of the Pilot of Feasibility Program (2023-2026) co-lead of the Pancreas and Islet Biology Affinity group (2020-), a user of the Immune Monitoring Cores, a previous recipient of a P&F Award, and collaborator with many SDRC members.