Diabetes Virtual Camp

08/02/2026

Diabetes Virtual Summer Camp 2026 (DVSC26) will kick off tomorrow with the Opening Session & Introduction to Diabetes. For DVSC26, we have 518 registered participants, including 250 participants from the U.S. and others representing 55 nations around the world, including Algeria, Bangladesh, Barbados, Cameroon, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Egypt, Ethiopia, Finland, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Honduras, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kuwait, Lebanon, Lesotho, Malawi, Mexico, Morocco, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, Palestinian Territories, Philippines, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sudan, Sweden, Thailand, Turkey, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and the USA (representing 36 U.S. states). As always, our participants represent diverse demographics in age (14 to 86 years of age with 69% at 18~35 years of age), and current status (84 high school students, 77 college students, 37 post-undergraduates, 74 graduate students, 49 medical students, 10 nursing students, 1 PA student, 38 pharmacy students, 4 nutritionists/dieticians, 14 medical residents, 12 clinical fellows, 36 postdoctoral researchers, 18 early-career physicians/scientists, 23 physicians, 8 scientists, 29 faculty members, and 4 other health professionals. As a virtual educational platform partnered with the American Diabetes Association, our audience will engage in active Q&A periods, open mic forums, and post-session tasks. Over the next 2 weeks and 13 Zoom sessions, our participants will learn about exciting diabetes research and new treatments and hear inspirational stories from world-renowned scientists and clinicians.

07/16/2026

The Diabetes Virtual Summer Camp 2026 (DVSC26) will be a 2-week program (August 3~14) consisting of 13 Zoom sessions and 9 leading experts. The online registration for this free virtual program is now open through July 29.
Since 2020, the Diabetes Virtual Camp (DVC) has completed 8 virtual programs for 3,728 attendees from over 70 countries worldwide. The DVC attendees represent diverse demographics in gender, age, ethnicity, and educational/professional status, including high school and college students, medical/graduate/nursing/pharmacy students, residents/fellows, postdocs, early-career clinicians/researchers, academic/industry/private physicians and scientists, professors, and other healthcare professionals. Many of our attendees also have type 1 or type 2 diabetes or live with families with diabetes, sharing a common goal of advancing knowledge in diabetes research and care and pursuing a career in medicine, research, and other healthcare fields.
This year’s program is highlighted by the following esteemed speakers:
Dr. Emilyn Alejandro (Marvin and Hadassah Bacaner Chair in Cardiovascular Physiology and Associate Director of the Minnesota Institute of Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism, University of Minnesota Medical School)
Dr. Mandeep Bajaj (Professor of Medicine and Medical Director of Baylor Medicine-Endocrinology, Diabetes & Metabolism, Baylor College of Medicine; Past President of the American Diabetes Association)
Dr. Jason Kim (Professor of Molecular Medicine, Professor of Medicine, Director of Metabolic Disease Research Center, and MD/PhD Admissions Committee, University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School)
Dr. John Kopchick (Distinguished Professor and Goll-Ohio Eminent Scholar and Professor of Molecular Biology, Ohio University Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine)
Dr. Lori Laffel (Professor of Pediatrics, Senior Investigator, Chief of Pediatric, Adolescent & Young Adult Section, and Section Head on Clinical, Behavioral & Outcomes Research, Joslin Diabetes Center, Harvard Medical School)
Dr. Rozalina McCoy (Associate Professor of Medicine, Vice Chief of Clinical Research, and Director of Precision Medicine & Population Health, University of Maryland School of Medicine and School of Public Health)
Dr. Mary-Elizabeth Patti (Professor of Medicine, Investigator, Adult Endocrinologist, and Director of Hypoglycemia Clinic, Joslin Diabetes Center, Harvard Medical School)
Dr. Giulio Romeo (Assistant Professor of Medicine, Associate Chief of Adult Diabetes Section, Assistant Investigator, and Staff Physician, Joslin Diabetes Center, Harvard Medical School)
Dr. Gerald Shulman (George R. Cowgill Professor of Physiological Chemistry, Professor of Internal Medicine and Cellular & Molecular Physiology, Co-Director of Yale Diabetes Research Center, Yale School of Medicine)
As part of the American Diabetes Association’s Scholars Program, we support the career development of students, trainees, residents, fellows, postdocs, early-career clinicians and researchers, and other healthcare professionals who currently or in future treat patients and/or research diabetes and its comorbidities.
Please visit our website for more information. https://www.diabetesvirtualcamp.org/

06/05/2026

Lovely to celebrate with Danielle and Caroline at this year’s American Diabetes Association annual meeting as ADA Scholars Program continues to shine with outstanding leadership and staff, awarding 70 clinical and research fellows, and continuing partnership with our Diabetes Virtual Camp program to support their career development, shaping the next generation of physicians and scientists.

03/18/2026

Science and networking at the Alzheimer’s disease conference in Copenhagen and getting some sweets at the historic Danish candy shop, Sømods Bolcher to sweeten the day.

02/24/2026

ADA Scholars - Standards of Care in Diabetes - Update for Early Career Professionals webinar
Standards of Care in Diabetes 2026 Update for Early Career Professionals
The 2026 Standards of Care in Diabetes includes the American Diabetes Association's (ADA) current clinical practice recommendations and is intended to provide clinicians, patients, researchers, payers, and others with the components of diabetes care, general treatment goals, and tools to evaluate the quality of care. The recommendations are based on an extensive review of the clinical diabetes literature, supplemented with input from the ADA staff and the medical community at large. The Standards of Care in Diabetes is updated annually, or more frequently online if new evidence or regulatory changes merit immediate incorporation and is published in Diabetes Care. Join this session to hear first-hand updates to the 2026 Standards of Care guidelines from Rita R. Kalyani, MD, MHS.
Learn more and register. https://lnkd.in/eqHdRkfV
Date: Wednesday, March 4, 2026, at 11 am EST
Moderator: Daisy Duan, MD, Assistant Professor, Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes, and Metabolism, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
Presenter: Rita R. Kalyani, MD, MHS, Chief Scientific & Medical Officer, American Diabetes Association
Learning Objective: At the end of this activity, the attendees should be able to identify the 2026 ADA Standards of Care for classifying, diagnosing, preventing and treating prediabetes and diabetes.
Audience: This session is specifically intended for Early Career Health Care Professionals, Endocrine and Diabetes Fellows.
This webinar is supported in part by a restricted educational grant from the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust and Corcept Therapeutics
Visit professional.diabetes.org/scholars to learn more about the ADA's Early Career program.

Apply for the ADA Scholars Program to advance your career in diabetes research and care. Networking, mentorship, and career workshops await!

08/19/2025

August 15, 2025. Session 13. Closing Session by the DVC Team (Lauren Kim, Allison Kim, and Dr. Jason Kim). After 13 exciting sessions of the Diabetes Virtual Summer Camp 2025, we arrived at the Closing Session with Lauren Kim (Founder, Program Director, and Webmaster), Allison Kim (Associate Director and Director of Outreach), and Dr. Jason Kim (Advisor). Lauren and Allison expressed heartfelt appreciation to the DVSC25 interns for their growing passion and commitment to diabetes research, education, and care. Our interns asked outstanding questions using the Chat box following each session, demonstrating vital traits of an investigator, observation, and inquiry. Their dedication to learning was demonstrated through the pre-session Q&A period and echoed during the open-mic forum. Dr. Kim explained the process of requesting a program certificate for the Diabetes Virtual Summer Camp 2025. The Diabetes Virtual Camp Team then administered electronic polls and surveys to collect important feedback from the interns about the program and explained the final program task to be completed within a week. Our interns didn’t want to leave as we held a final open-mic forum where the interns were unmuted to directly ask questions and provide more feedback on our program. The Closing Sessions ended with the final farewells to everyone as we remain hopeful that our program has met the goals to support the next generation of physicians and scientists and one day find a cure for diabetes. The Diabetes Virtual Camp looks forward to seeing you all in 2026!

08/19/2025

August 15, 2025. Session 12. “Role of Inflammation in Type 2 Diabetes and Fatty Liver Disease” by Dr. Jason Kim (University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School). The Closing Sessions continued with a more exciting session on type 2 diabetes and one of its major comorbidities, fatty liver disease, from Dr. Jason Kim. Dr. Kim began by introducing key discoveries made in early 2000 with IL-6 regulating insulin action and macrophages infiltrating adipose tissue in obesity, shaping an exciting new paradigm on the role of inflammation in type 2 diabetes. He discussed how IL-10 is a major anti-inflammatory cytokine in our body, and muscle-selective overexpression of IL-10 rescued mice from insulin resistance associated with obesity and aging. This was due to IL-10’s effects to suppress obesity and aging-mediated inflammation in skeletal muscle. Dr. Kim further highlighted how excess weight gain is a common issue in pregnancy, and offspring mice from high-fat diet-fed females developed insulin resistance with inflammation in the liver, supporting the important notion that excess weight gain during pregnancy may contribute to gestational diabetes and intergenerational risk for diabetes. He then discussed metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease and how IFNg signaling in macrophages regulates obesity-mediated inflammation and insulin resistance in the liver. Mice with a conditional loss of IFNg signaling in macrophages were protected from diet-induced insulin resistance in the liver and fatty liver progression to inflammation and fibrosis, implicating macrophage IFNg signaling as a critical checkpoint in the development of metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis. Dr. Kim ended by briefly sharing some preliminary data from recent projects focusing on the molecular relationship between Alzheimer’s disease and type 2 diabetes.

08/19/2025

August 15, 2025. Session 11. “Anti-Diabetic Effects of Estrogen and Testosterone in Women and Men” by Dr. Franck Mauvais-Jarvis (Tulane University School of Medicine). After 2 weeks of exciting and inspiring sessions from the Experts, we have reached the finale of this year’s program. Dr. Mauvais-Jarvis began by illustrating how s*x is a genetic modifier of human diseases. Estradiol and testosterone are key metabolic hormones in females, with estrogens playing a potent role in regulating insulin sensitivity and glucose homeostasis. Interestingly, all autoimmune disorders have a female bias in prevalence, except for type 1 diabetes, which may relate to estrogen’s protective effects on beta-cell function and survival in females. Estradiol was also shown to improve human islet engraftment and revascularization in insulin-deficient diabetic mice. Dr. Mauvais-Jarvis further discussed how estrogens promote degradation of misfolded proinsulin, thereby protecting insulin production and delaying diabetes. Targeting estrogen delivery selectively to the brain and beta-cells was achieved using GLP-1-E2 fusion peptides, conferring metabolic protection via GLP-1R and ERa. Dr. Mauvais-Jarvis also discussed polycystic o***y syndrome, a topic of high interest to our interns. He then discussed how testosterone is an anti-diabetic hormone in men, and the testicular-islet axis uses testosterone to enhance GLP-1 action. He further presented how a conditional loss of androgen receptor in beta-cells resulted in type 2 diabetes phenotypes in mice, implicating an important role of testosterone in beta-cells. Dihydrotestosterone was shown to increase GLP-1 action as the androgen receptor interacts with GLP-1 receptor, resulting in increased GLP-1-mediated insulin secretion by the beta-cells. Dr. Mauvais-Jarvis ended by discussing how s*x differences in human islet cell transcriptomes predominantly affect s*x chromosome genes. Very interesting science on our s*x hormones as they relate to diabetes!

08/14/2025

August 11, 2025. Session 8. “Redox Biology in Diabetes: Lessons from the Glutathione Spectrum” by Dr. Vasilis Vasiliou (Yale School of Public Health). Dr. Vasiliou began with an introduction to the glutathione (GSH) spectrum as a double-edged sword in redox biology, describing GSH in diabetes and redox biology in metabolism. He discussed the important role of oxidative stress in human diseases, highlighting low GSH levels in the pathogenesis of fatty liver disease, and the protective role of the antioxidant system. Catalase is an antioxidant enzyme, and his earlier research found that the loss of catalase can promote prediabetic and obesity phenotypes. Dr. Vasiliou showed how a conditional deletion of glutamate-cysteine ligase catalytic (Gclc) subunit, the rate-limiting step in GSH biosynthesis, in the pancreas results in a severe diabetes phenotype at an early age due to loss of insulin-producing beta-cells and defects in glucose-stimulated insulin secretion. These effects were associated with oxidative stress in their islets. Using a tamoxifen-inducible approach to ablate the Gclc gene in later life, Dr. Vasiliou found that mice initially developed hyperinsulinemia that was followed by hyperglycemia and delayed diabetes phenotypes. The early preservation of redox balance despite reduced GSH levels may be due to compensatory mechanisms that are insufficient to maintain beta-cell function over time. In all, these exciting findings from Dr. Vailiou’s laboratory offer new insight into the role of GSH biosynthesis in maintaining beta-cell health in the adult pancreas.