We are pleased to announce that Nicola Beer (a final year DPhil student working under the supervision of Dr Anna Gloyn and Professor Patrik Rorsman at the Oxford Centre for Diabetes, Endocrinology, and Metabolism) has recently been awarded the Fulbright Diabetes UK Research Award 2011-12.
The award is jointly funded by both the US Fulbright Commission and the UK-based charity Diabetes UK and is granted to a UK citizen in support of research at any accredited US institution into the clinical or biomedical aspects of diabetes or the social or economic issues faced by people living with diabetes.
Nicola’s DPhil Thesis is entitled ‘The role of genetic variation in glucokinase and glucokinase regulatory protein in diabetes and related traits’ and she expects submit it by the end of December 2010. Her research interests include glucose metabolism and the regulation of insulin secretion from the beta-cell.
Nicola will be working under the supervision of Professor David Altshuler Director of the Program in Medical and Population Genetics at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Boston, USA. She will be working on translating discoveries from large-scale genetic analyses into an understanding of the role of ER stress in type 2 diabetes.