More than 38 million Americans had diabetes in 2021—or 11.6% of the population—with the largest disease burden falling on Native, Black and Hispanic populations. The cost of diabetes care rose to $412.9 billion in 2022, accounting for one in four health-care dollars spent in this country.

Those staggering statistics make it clear that advancing research on diabetes from the lab to the clinic is urgent, particularly because minoritized populations are hit so hard by the eighth leading cause of disease in this country. Importantly, there is an urgent needs to catalyze the development of a more diverse workforce, including creating infrastructure to support recruitment and retention of diabetes translational scientists who reflect the diversity of people affected by diabetes.

“We are committed to reducing the burden of diabetes-related health inequities through partnerships with communities and through policy and practice innovation,” said Alyce Adams, PhD, MPP, a professor of health policy.

Adams, the Stanford Medicine Innovation Professor, is co-director of the DREAMS Center for Diabetes Translational Research, led by Stanford, the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research, and UC San Francisco. Their mission is to catalyze the development and implementation of high-impact and sustainable interventions to improve diabetes outcomes and advance health equity among high-risk populations in California’s Bay Area and rural Central Valley.

The DREAMS-CDTR recently received funds from the , the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK)  to host a national meeting at Stanford for some 60 researchers from the DREAMS-CDTR center and its umbrella organization and to kick off a national community of practice to foster diversity of the diabetes translation workforce.

The meeting was hosted by two early stage investigators, Tainayah Thomas, PhD, MPH, assistant professor of epidemiology and population health at Stanford,  and Luis Rodriguez, PhD, MPH,  a research scientist at the Kaiser Permanente Northern California Division of Research, both of whom are being mentored by Adams. The meeting focused on the needs of junior researchers and included brainstorming, networking and works-in-progress sessions. The five-minute speed networking sessions among the attendees to make new connections, share their research and offer up workplace anecdotes that might be helpful to their new contacts.

Graphic Designer Nevada Lane created three designs to highlight all the networking and concepts being shared at the conference.

Pamela Thornton, Acting Senior Advisor for Workforce Diversity and Health Equity Research for the Office of the Director at the NIDDK, opened the day by noting it takes some 17 years to translate evidence into practice. That can seem a lifetime for those needing the potentially lifesaving results of the research being done by those attending the conference.

“I just want to challenge you, stay the course and stay focused,” said Thornton, director of the NIDDK Center for Diabetes Translational Research, the funding arm for the California DREAMS team. “We want to solve big issues in this country, health disparities and health inequities. So be kind enough to your colleagues to give them honest advice—and be grateful when you get it.”

Thornton said the mission of the Center for Diabetes Translational Research is to establish faster research results so that interventions and strategies can be adopted in real-world health care and community settings. Another key focus is to bring resources to researchers across the country, recognizing there are often many significant challenges associated with academic career progression, such as a lack of supportive learning communities, not enough time for clinical trial research, and disparities in funding trial research.

“The last challenge I have for you, when you get home, the phone is going to ring, the dog is going to bark, somebody’s going to need your attention,” she said. “But commit yourselves to following through on the advice and all of the blue sky ideas you got today.”