January 2023

The Fraternal Order of Eagles Diabetes Research Center held its 8th annual retreat on December 3, 2022, at the Terry Trueblood Recreation Center. DRC faculty and senior trainees came together for a day of research and celebration of the Center’s continued success.

The day began with opening remarks by Co-Directors’ Kamal Rahmouni, PhD and Andrew Norris, MD, PhD followed by updates from the Metabolic Phenotyping Core and the Metabolomics Core Facility. We also heard from two new DRC faculty members, Bing Li, PhD, and Marcelo Correia, MD. This year we listened to presentations reporting annual progress from last year’s Pilot and Feasibility Grant Recipients, Katie Larson Ode, MD, Jon Resch, PhD, Ling Yang, PhD and Erin Talbert, PhD.

Our keynote speaker was Lori Sussel, PhD from the Anschutz School of Medicine at the University of Colorado’s Barbara Davis Diabetes Center for Diabetes, who gave a talk titled “Pancreatic Islet Function: The Splice of Life”. Dr. Sussel discussed her most recent work regarding the genetic mechanisms that controls the development and function of the pancreas.

For this year’s retreat, we invited the Center for Gene Therapy to join us as many members of this Center are involved in diabetes research. Thus, following the lunch session, the Center for Gene Therapy gave two different presentations. John Engelhardt, PhD, and Amy Ryan, PhD gave talks discussing cystic fibrosis and its relation to diabetes. During the last oral presentation session, we heard updates from first-year T32 Diabetes Research Training Program trainees on their most current research. Other trainees presented their work in a poster format during the lunch session.

Our celebration of yet another successful year for the Diabetes Research Center culminated in the announcement of the trainee prizes bestowed on Paul Williams, PhD and Guorui Deng, PhD.