Dr. Jason Kim
Advisor

I am a Professor of Molecular Medicine and Professor of Medicine in the Division of Endocrinology, Metabolism, and Diabetes at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School. I am also a Director of the Metabolic Disease Research Center and a former Director of the National Mouse Metabolic Phenotyping Center funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) at UMass. My research for 30 years has focused on type 2 diabetes and obesity, and I have made a significant contribution to the field with 183 peer-reviewed publications, mostly in high-impact scientific journals such as Science, Nature, and Cell Metabolism, receiving more than 34,000 citations. As an NIH-funded investigator since 2001, my research investigates the molecular link between inflammation and insulin resistance as underlying mechanisms of obesity-driven type 2 diabetes and metabolic liver and cardiovascular diseases. After graduating from the University of California Irvine and the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, my academic career began as an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Section of Endocrinology and Metabolism at Yale University School of Medicine in 2002. Then, I became an Associate Professor of Cellular and Molecular Physiology at the Penn State College of Medicine in 2005 and a Full Professor with Tenure at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in 2008. I am currently a member of the MD/PhD Admissions Committee at UMass Chan Medical School, and I have more than 20 years of experience serving on the medical school admissions committee with my previous tenure at Yale and Penn State. My scientific expertise is globally acknowledged as an Adjunct Professor at Seoul National University, an Adjunct Investigator at Harvard Medical School, and a Chair of NIH and American Heart Association Grant Review Committees while serving on the Dean’s Advisory Board of the University of Hong Kong, the External Advisory Committee of Columbia University and Johns Hopkins University Diabetes Center, and Scientific Advisory Boards of several pharmaceutical companies. Over the years, I have taught numerous courses for undergraduate, graduate, medical, nursing, and pharmacy students while mentoring more than 100 MD/PhD students, research interns, postdocs, clinical fellows, junior faculty, and visiting professors from around the world. Overall, my lifelong academic tenure has profoundly advanced our understanding of important biological events in type 2 diabetes with the goal of finding its cure and fostered the training of the next generation of physicians and scientists.