DEFINE-T2D Investigator and Staff Spotlights

Qibin Qi, PhD


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Dr. Qi is a Professor of Epidemiology and Population Health as well as Associate Director for Center for Population Cohorts at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He is one of the MPIs of the MGH Manning DEFINE-T2D site. His major research interest is to identify novel molecule signatures (e.g., metabolites and proteins) and related pathways which may help better understand the pathophysiology of cardiometabolic diseases, especially type 2 diabetes. Dr. Qi is a molecular epidemiologist with a background in genetics, biomarkers, and nutrition. His interest in nature and the life sciences started in elementary school, but he committed fully to his scientific career after completing his PhD training and his postdoctoral training at the Harvard School of Public Health. In DEFINE-T2D, he is involved in multiple projects, including Project 1 “Phenotypic clustering of individuals with type 2 diabetes”, Project 2 “Polygenic score clustering of T2D and prediabetes”, and Project 3 “Clustering of T2D patients prior to disease onset”, as well as the Omics and Analysis working groups, where he brings his expertise in T2D epidemiology, genetics and multi-omics. He looks forward to seeing novel AI and machine learning approaches applied to T2D subtyping in DEFINE-T2D projects.

Shylaya (Shy) Srinivasan, MD, MAS


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Dr. Srinivasan is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of California San Francisco. She is a physician-scientist whose work aims to improve outcomes for youth with type 2 diabetes by developing more personalized approaches to treatment. Her research centers on understanding the risk factors for T2D development in youth,  including understudied populations such as Asian American and Native  Hawaiian and Pacific Islander groups. She also studies variability in T2D medication response, disease progression, and the use of real-world electronic health record data to inform clinical decision-making for youth with type 2 diabetes. As a practicing pediatric endocrinologist, she cares for children and adolescents with endocrine disorders and diabetes. Receiving outstanding mentorship and the opportunity to work on meaningful research questions during her pediatric endocrinology fellowship shaped her path as a physician-scientist. In DEFINE-T2D, she serves as a co-investigator on the MGH Udler site representing the Progress in Diabetes Genetics in Youth (ProDiGY) Consortium, which brings together genetic and clinical data from the Treatment Options for Type 2 Diabetes in Adolescents and Youth (TODAY) and SEARCH for Diabetes in Youth studies. She is a Co-Convener of the Phenotype Working Group, bringing her expertise in diabetes physiology and working with large, multi-study datasets to support phenotype harmonization efforts across the Consortium. In future DEFINE-T2D work, she would love to see more projects focused on early-onset type 2 diabetes and increased inclusion of understudied racial and ethnic populations. 

Megan Shuey, PhD


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Dr. Shuey is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Pharmacology and Genetics at Vanderbilt University. Her research program incorporates genetic epidemiology, pharmacology, and informatics to 1) elucidate and contextualize factors that influence complex disease risk; 2) predict medication response and profile adverse-event risk; and 3) develop evidence-based prioritization strategies for drug discovery and repurposing efforts. She knew that she wanted to work in the medical field since childhood, but it wasn’t until college that she realized she could make scientific research into a career. Dr. Shuey received her Bachelors in Molecular and Cellular Biology with minors in Anthropology and Science Education from the University of Arizona. During her undergraduate studies, she completed a thesis on Y-STR assay development for human lineage tracing and worked in a virology lab. She then received her Master's in evolutionary genetics and worked in a Biosafety Level III laboratory at Northern Arizona University. As the final move of her scientific career so far, she moved to Nashville to get a PhD from Vanderbilt University where she studied Pharmacology with a dissertation project focused heavily on electronic health record (EHR) phenotyping and medication response extraction. She continued this work as a postdoctoral fellow at Vanderbilt Medical Center and then joined the faculty of Vanderbilt Health. In DEFINE-T2D, Dr. Shuey leads the EHR Working Group and oversees data harmonization efforts as well as the development of standard operating procedures for variable extraction and validation. In addition, she is an investigator on the Polygenic score clustering of T2D and prediabetes project. She has an interest in sex-differences, maternal health, and multi-omics, and is looking for new collaborations in this space. In DEFINE-T2D, she hopes to do more work to understand diabetes across the life-course and the implications of sex hormone fluctuations.

Mark Espeland, PhD


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Dr. Espeland is a Professor in the Divisions of Gerontology and Geriatric Medicine and Public Health Sciences. He received his PhD in Statistics from the University of Rochester. He has been a faculty member at Wake Forest School of Medicine since 1986, including 11 years of serving as Chair of the Department of Biostatistics. His growth as a scientist has been nurtured by opportunities to collaborate with remarkable cross-disciplinary teams for many years. He shifted his primary academic appointment at Wake Forest from biostatistics to gerontology, sparked by his interest in cognitive aging as part of the leadership team for the Women’s Health Initiative Memory Study. His current research interest continues to be in aging and cognitive decline, focusing specifically on the roles that T2D and obesity play in accelerating these processes and asking whether the processes may be slowed by behavioral interventions. He has been working with the Look AHEAD research program with Dr. Lynne Wagenknecht since its inception and has helped to transition it into a study of aging, leading ancillary studies to the program that focused on brain MRI and cognitive aging. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association, the Society for Clinical Trials, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In DEFINE-T2D, he co-leads the Publications and Presentations Committee. Scientifically, he is interested in how aging-related outcomes might differ among T2D subtypes identified in DEFINE-T2D.

Aastha Kakar, PhD, MBBS


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Dr. Kakar is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Colorado Anschutz and an investigator in the DEFINE-T2D Biostatistics Research Center. She studies why individuals with obesity and type 2 diabetes follow different disease trajectories by integrating genetic and omics data to identify distinct biological processes underlying metabolic risk. More specifically, her work focuses on polygenic and multi-omics risk scores, and predictors of cardiometabolic complications. She trained as a physician in India and later transitioned into genetic epidemiology to understand the biological heterogeneity she observed in clinical settings. She decided to pursue research during medical school, when caring for patients with similar diagnoses, but vastly different outcomes made her want to investigate the underlying mechanisms. She received her PhD in Genetic Epidemiology from the University of Louisville. In DEFINE-T2D, she is the Project Manager for the Phenotype Working Group and the EHR Subgroup, and she also supports the Steering Committee through administrative coordination and project management responsibilities. Scientifically, she contributes to the Phenotypic clustering of individuals with type 2 diabetes project. She is also interested in genetic clustering, multi-omics integration, and cardiometabolic complications, as well as incorporating AI and machine learning within DEFINE T2D to integrate genetics, multi-omics, and EHR data.

DEFINE-T2D Investigator and Staff Spotlights from previous months

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