DEFINE-T2D Investigator and Staff Spotlights
Nichole (Palmer) Allred, PhD
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 Molecualr 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.
Qing Pan, PhD
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).
Ravi Shah, PhD
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.
Zsu-Zsu Chen, PhD
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.
Kyle Salmon, MSPH
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.
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