E. Dale Abel, MD, PhD is the William S. Adams Distinguished Professor and Chair for the Department of Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, and Executive Medical Director at UCLA Health.

Dr. Abel has had a distinguished career in endocrine and metabolism research. His pioneering work on glucose transport and mitochondrial metabolism in the heart guides his current research interests: molecular mechanisms responsible for cardiovascular complications of diabetes. His laboratory has provided important insights into the contribution of mitochondrial dysfunction and aberrant insulin signaling, to heart failure risk in diabetes.

Dr. Abel’s research program has been continually funded by the National Institutes of Health since 1995, and by the American Heart Association, the American Diabetes Association, and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. Dr. Abel is the recipient of numerous awards for scholarship and mentorship, including awards and endowed lectureships such as the Fred Conrad Koch Lifetime Achievement Award of the Endocrine Society, the 2018 African American Museum of Iowa History Makers Award. He is an elected member of the American Association of Physicians (AAP), the American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI), the American Clinical and Climatological Association (ACCA), the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) and the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). He is past President of the Endocrine Society and the Association of Professors of Medicine.

Learn more about the department's work and Dr. E. Dale Abel's accomplishments here.

INVITED SPEAKERS

Dr. Brenda Dorcely is a Clinical Assistant Professor for the Holman Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes, & Metabolism at NYU Langone Health. Her research focuses on obesity, continuous glucose monitoring, early dysglycemia detection for diabetes prevention, and the impact of metabolic disorders on white blood cell inflammation. Dr. Dorcely’s current work investigates the changes in white blood cell inflammation before and after weight loss from bariatric surgery in individuals with and without diabetes.

Maria Jimenez Gonzalez is an instructor in Dr. Sarah Stanley’s laboratory at the Diabetes, Obesity, and Metabolism Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY. She earned her PhD in Molecular and Cellular Biology from the University of Navarre, Spain.

Dr. Jimenez Gonzalez’s research focuses on investigating the connection between the pancreas and the peripheral nervous system, particularly the role of neural inputs in pancreatic function and diseases such as diabetes.

Utilizing cutting-edge techniques, she integrates 3D imaging of the pancreas with tissue-specific neuromodulation to examine the impact of autonomic innervation on islet function, glycemic control, and disease progression in mouse models of diabetes.

Alexander R. Nectow is a clinician-scientist and a Principal Investigator on the faculty of Columbia University’s Department of Medicine. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Engineering Science and Biomedical Engineering, respectively, from Tufts University in 2011. He earned his PhD from Rockefeller University in 2015, during which he developed novel molecular profiling technologies and identified the dorsal raphe nucleus as a key node regulating food intake. Shortly after completing his PhD, Alex started his laboratory as a CV Starr Fellow at Princeton University’s Princeton Neuroscience Institute in 2016. Alex then joined the faculty of Columbia University’s Department of Medicine in 2019, shortly before completing his MD in 2020. While continuing to run his lab, he concurrently completed an internal medicine residency through the clinician-scientist pathway at NYP-Columbia. He is currently completing a clinical fellowship in cardiology, also at NYP-Columbia.

Alex has been recognized with a number of honors and awards, such as The Rockefeller University’s David Rockefeller Fellowship, Princeton University’s CV Starr Fellowship, Columbia University's Titus Munson Coan Prize, the American Society for Clinical Investigation's Emerging-Generation Award, and the American Diabetes Association’s Innovative Basic Science Award and Pathway to Stop Diabetes Accelerator Award. He was also recently a NARSAD Young Investigator.

The Nectow lab works on the neurobiology of cardiometabolism. We are working to understand the molecular, cellular, and circuit mechanisms governing appetite, as well as cardiovascular physiology

Shannon Reilly is an Assistant Professor of Metabolic health at Weill Cornell Medicine. The Reilly lab is working to uncover the signaling pathways regulating adipocyte metabolism and the role they play in whole organism energy balance and metabolic health.

Dr. Yvon Woappi is the Herbert and Florence Irving Assistant Professor of Physiology and Cellular Biophysics, Dermatology, and Biomedical Engineering at Columbia University. His research focuses on gene editing and multiomic technologies to uncover how cellular heterogeneity influences tissue repair – a process critical to wound healing, diabetic ulcers, and carcinomas. Dr. Woappi earned his Ph.D. as a Grace Jordan McFadden Fellow at the University of South Carolina and completed his postdoctoral training in the Harvard Dermatology Research Training Program at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Woappi’s pioneering early-career research is laying the foundation for synthetic wound regeneration, a systems bioengineering approach that leverages cellular heterogeneity to enhance tissue repair and regeneration. He also serves as a principal investigator of an NIGMS R00 MOSAIC award and is a dedicated mentor committed to fostering the next generation of scientists.