DEFINE-T2D Investigator and Staff Spotlights

Mary Rooney, PhD, MPH

Dr. Mary Rooney is an Assistant Research Professor at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. She is an epidemiologist whose research seeks to identify more precise ways to predict diabetes risk and progression using both traditional clinical measures and novel biomarkers, supporting earlier, more personalized prevention strategies. Dr. Rooney's path to epidemiology began during her undergraduate studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. While deciding between biology and the social sciences, she discovered epidemiology and was immediately drawn to its multidisciplinary nature, as well as its emphasis on prevention and population health. Within the DEFINE-T2D Consortium, Dr. Rooney contributes her expertise through the Omics and Phenotype Working Groups and is leading a DEFINE-T2D project on prediabetes clustering using clinical variables across multiple cohorts. Her work in DEFINE-T2D dovetails with a NIDDK K01 award that Dr. Rooney received in 2025, which aims to refine risk stratification for diabetes and complications among people with prediabetes using clinical and novel omics measurements.

Kristina Utzschneider, MD

Dr. Kristina M. Utzschneider is a board-certified endocrinologist at the VA Puget Sound, Director of the VA Diabetes Care Program, and an Associate Professor of Medicine and Metabolism, Endocrinology and Nutrition at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on preserving beta-cell function through interventions such as diet, medications, and weight loss, and on identifying type 2 diabetes subtypes to better understand disease mechanisms, personalize treatment, and predict future complications. Dr. Utzschneider’s interest in medicine began early in life and was reinforced by hands-on exposure to physiology and neuroscience during elementary school. Research experiences throughout college and medical school further shaped her career path, particularly studies investigating hormonal responses to hypoglycemia. Within DEFINE-T2D, Dr. Utzschneider serves as one of the principal investigators for the MGH–Udler site. She is actively involved in the Phenotype Working Group, including the Electronic Health Record (EHR) subgroup, as well as the Publications & Presentations Committee. She is a member of one of the core DEFINE-T2D projects, clustering of T2D patients prior to disease onset, which seeks to define diabetes subgroups using metabolomics data collected before disease onset. Her contributions to the Consortium draw on both her scientific expertise in physiology underlying type 2 diabetes and her clinical experience caring for individuals with diverse forms of diabetes. Through DEFINE-T2D, she is particularly interested in advancing approaches to applying diabetes subtyping to the continuum of disease, including prediabetes to be able to define the risk and trajectory of progression earlier.

Lana Olson, PhD

Dr. Lana Olson is a Senior Biostatistician at Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist whose research focuses on identifying type 2 diabetes subtypes through phenotypic clustering. Her work builds upon prior diabetes subtyping studies and seeks to validate and extend these approaches across diverse DEFINE-T2D cohorts. Drawn to science through her interest in applying quantitative methods to clinically relevant problems, Dr. Olson pursued training in biostatistics and now specializes in the use of statistical approaches to advance biomedical research. She is particularly motivated by opportunities to translate complex data into insights that can improve patient care. Within the DEFINE-T2D Consortium, Dr. Olson contributes statistical expertise, including the development of sharable programming code to promote reproducibility. She is a member of one of the core DEFINE-T2D projects, phenotypic clustering of individuals with type 2 diabetes, where she applies her biostatistical expertise to advance diabetes subtyping using clinical variables. Looking ahead, Dr. Olson is interested in exploring how type 2 diabetes subtype patterns compare across individual cohorts vs. in combined analyses. She believes these efforts can provide important insights into the diversity of type 2 diabetes and help inform more personalized approaches to treatment.

Xue Zhong, PhD

Dr. Xue Zhong is a computational biologist and biostatistician whose research focuses on understanding disease heterogeneity through the integration of genomics, electronic health records (EHRs), and multi-omics data. Working at the intersection of precision medicine and data science, she uses large-scale EHR-linked biobanks to investigate complex diseases. She is particularly interested in developing predictive models that connect type 2 diabetes heterogeneity with treatment response and other clinically actionable outcomes. Currently a Research Assistant Professor in the Division of Genetic Medicine and Clinical Pharmacology in the Department of Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Dr. Zhong integrates genomic data, molecular profiles, and clinical records to answer meaningful questions about human health and disease. Within the DEFINE-T2D Consortium, Dr. Zhong contributes to the analytical design and implementation of projects focused on genetics-based diabetes subtyping, including one of the core DEFINE-T2D projects, polygenic score clustering of T2D and prediabetes, and both the Analysis and Phenotype Working Groups. She has also contributed to the development of methods for EHR-based phenotyping, longitudinal data analysis, and deep learning to identify incident type 2 diabetes cases using diverse datasets, including EHR data. Looking toward the future, Dr. Zhong is interested in advancing precision medicine approaches that move beyond broad diabetes subtype classifications. She believes that individualized prediction models, powered by artificial intelligence and deep learning, may offer a more effective path toward understanding disease progression, predicting treatment response, and tailoring care to the unique characteristics of each patient.

Iain Konigsberg, PhD

Dr. Iain Konigsberg is a Senior Research Scientist in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Colorado Anschutz. He is a computational geneticist whose research leverages genetics, multi-omics technologies, and large-scale biobank data to uncover the biological mechanisms underlying complex diseases. He is especially interested in identifying biomarkers that can predict disease progression and provide insights into dynamic biological changes over time. Dr. Konigsberg earned his PhD in Human Medical Genetics and Genomics after developing an interest in genetics during high school. He was drawn to the field by its potential to improve the lives of people affected by serious diseases and quickly discovered a passion for discovery-driven, data-intensive research. As a member of the DEFINE-T2D Biostatistics Research Center, Dr. Konigsberg provides both analytical and administrative support to Consortium investigators and projects. He is a member of the Omics Working Group and the Publications and Presentations Committee. He co-leads a Consortium project, Harmonizing T2D-Associated Metabolites Across Metabolomics Platforms, which seeks to harmonize data across diverse metabolomics platforms. Dr. Konigsberg also contributes analytically to projects on diabetes subtyping, multi-omics predictors of incident diabetes, and metabolomics-based proxies of key type 2 diabetes traits. His expertise in computational biology, statistical genetics, and multi-omics integration helps advance collaborative efforts across the Consortium. Looking to the future, Dr. Konigsberg is interested in opportunities to look at the connections between diabetes, metabolic dysregulation, and chronic respiratory disease.

DEFINE-T2D Investigator and Staff Spotlights from previous months

Kyle Salmon, MSPH is a Project Manager with the Biostatistics Research Center. From a young age, Kyle was interested in health, nutrition, science, math, and had a passion to help others. During the beginning of her undergraduate education, she discovered Public Health Nutrition and knew that was the career path for her. After graduating from Syracuse University with a B.S. in Public Health and Nutrition, she received her MSPH in Human Nutrition at Johns Hopkins University. She has worked for a number of public health agencies including a U.S. Army Public Health Center, the Maryland Department of Health, and now in the Lifecourse Epidemiology of Adiposity & Diabetes (LEAD) Center in the Colorado School of Public Health, where she focuses on prevention of chronic diseases from a public health nutrition lens. In DEFINE-T2D, Kyle helps manage the Analysis Working Group and the Publications & Presentations Committee to ensure they run effectively and efficiently.

Dr. Nichole (Palmer) Allred is a Professor of Biochemistry at the Wake Forest School of Medicine. She is a molecular geneticist who holds a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Her research focuses on understanding the genomic architecture of diabetes towards prediction and treatment of disease. Combining omics-derived data with quantitative, intermediate phenotypes provides the opportunity to advance our understanding of disease. In addition, it also creates the opportunity to understand how these sophisticated physiological phenotypes can be modeled using less invasive omics data to enhance power and expand impact. In DEFINE-T2D, Dr. Allred is a Multiple Principal Investigator (MPI) for the Wake Forest study site along with Drs. Bancks and Hsu. She is a co-convener of the Omics working group which aligns well with her research interest in using omics technologies to understand the genetic architecture of cardiometabolic disease. With a broad interest in quantitative intermediate phenotypes of glucose homeostasis, she would like to see more metabolic phenotyping and wearable technologies used in DEFINE-T2D to disentangle the heterogeneity underlying diabetes.

Dr. Qing Pan is a Professor of Statistics in the Milken Institute School of Public Health at the George Washington University. She completed her Ph.D. in 2007 in Biostatistics at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She has over 20 years of experience coordinating large-scale multicenter clinical studies, including the Diabetes Prevention Program Outcome Studies (DPPOS), the Antibacterial Resistance Leadership Group, and PATHWEIGH Pragmatic Weight Management in Primary Care. As the lead statistician in these trials, she participates in proposal preparation, data management, statistical analysis, conference presentations, and paper publication on various mobility and mortality outcomes as well as high-dimensional “omics” data. She has also served as PI or co-I for multiple projects funded by NIH, Gates Foundation, FDA, and US Department of Justice. Her main interests are applying cutting-edge computational tools to modern clinical research. She brings in her expertise in the DPPOS study to DEFINE-T2D through one of the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) study sites (MPIs: Udler, Mercader, Utzschneider).

Dr. Ravi Shah is a Professor of Medicine and the Gottlieb C. Friesinger II Endowed Chair in Cardiovascular Medicine. He serves as the co-director of the Vanderbilt Diabetes Research Center and Director of Clinical and Translational Cardiovascular Science in the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine. Dr. Shah got his MD from Harvard in 2007 followed by internship, residency and fellowship training at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He is a physician scientist focused on the metabolic underpinnings of CVD. His group is interested in why certain patients with metabolic illnesses—specifically obesity and diabetes—develop CVD. Research questions his group tries to answer are:

(1) How do specific molecular biomarkers that reflect metabolic dysfunction (e.g., metabolites and proteins in the blood) predict CVD or related cardiometabolic diseases? and
(2) Can these “biomarkers” be used to uncover potential mechanisms of CVD and related diseases?

In DEFINE-T2D, Dr. Shah is a co-investigator at the Vanderbilt site (MPIs Ng and Gamazon), where his group brings expertise in CVD phenotypes, metabolomics and proteomics, and epidemiologic and machine learning approaches.  He is interested in seeing the progress in the phenotyping space, including lifestyle and environment (the “exposome”), wearable data, imaging, and other more granular data on dysglycemia in DEFINE-T2D. He also thinks that harnessing artificial intelligence approaches to analyze these rich phenotype data will give our community unique insights into diabetes heterogeneity and will provide an anchor for molecular genetic discovery.

Dr. Zsu-Zsu Chen is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School and Staff Physician Scientist at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC). She is a clinician scientist, with an MD from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and an MPH in Quantitative Methods at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She decided to become a clinician scientist during her research years as an endocrinology fellow at BIDMC. Her research focuses on elucidating causal disease pathways and their interactions with adapted behaviors, environmental exposures, and therapeutic treatments through the lens of the plasma circulatome with the goal of helping to optimize prevention and treatment strategies in type 2 diabetes. She has recently been focused on understanding how repeated proteomics and metabolomic measurements may help identify novel circulating T2D biomarkers that may point to distinct biology compared to associations found with a single measurement. Additionally, she has been studying how circulating small molecule and protein T2D biomarkers may reveal why the age of onset of T2D appears to be associated with different rates of T2D progression to long term micro- and macrovascular complications. She is a DEFINE-T2D co-investigator through one of the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) study sites (MPIs: Manning, Qi, Rotter, Wood). She is a member of the Omics and Phenotyping working group and is involved in multiple ongoing DEFINE-T2D projects. In addition to her current work in DEFINE-T2D, she is interested in improving T2D and long-term micro/macrovascular complications.

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CU Anschutz

DEFINE-T2D Investigator and Staff Spotlights

Mary Rooney, PhD, MPH

Kristina Utzschneider, MD

Lana Olson, PhD

Xue Zhong, PhD

Iain Konigsberg, PhD

DEFINE-T2D Investigator and Staff Spotlights from previous months

DEFINE-T2D Investigator and Staff Spotlights

Mary Rooney, PhD, MPH

Kristina Utzschneider, MD

Lana Olson, PhD

Xue Zhong, PhD

Iain Konigsberg, PhD

DEFINE-T2D Investigator and Staff Spotlights from previous months

Kyle Salmon, MSPH

Nichole (Palmer) Allred, PhD

Qing Pan, PhD

Ravi Shah, PhD

Zsu-Zsu Chen, PhD