Members in the News: Gerald I. Shulman Receives ADA’s Highest Honor

Endocrine Society member Gerald I. Shulman, MD, PhD, is the recipient of the American Diabetes Association’s (ADA’s) 2018 Banting Medal for Scientific Achievement, the ADA’s highest honor.

The Banting Medal recognizes significant, long-term contributions to the understanding, treatment, or prevention of diabetes. Shulman will be recognized with this honor during the ADA’s 78^th Scientific Sessions, June 22-26, 2018, at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, and will deliver his Banting Medal Lecture, titled “Mechanisms of Insulin Resistance: Implications for Obesity, Lipodystrophy and Type 2 Diabetes,” on Sunday, June 24.

Currently the George R. Cowgill Professor of Medicine and Cellular and Molecular Physiology at Yale University School of Medicine and co-director of the Yale Diabetes Research Center, Shulman is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. He is renowned for his transformative studies examining the molecular mechanisms of insulin resistance in humans, and his work has been vastly important to our knowledge of the origination and development of type 2 diabetes.

“Dr. Shulman’s work has redefined our understanding of the physiology contributing to diabetes development, thereby opening strategies for treatment of type 2 diabetes,” says the ADA’s 2018 President of Medicine and Science Jane E.B. Reusch, MD. “Congratulations on this much-deserved honor for your paradigm-shifting contributions to our knowledge of diabetes.”

Shulman has developed and implemented novel tools to identify the underpinnings of human metabolic physiology, leading to cutting-edge discoveries that have challenged the status quo and stimulated new directions in the field of diabetes research. His groundbreaking application of magnetic resonance spectroscopy made it possible to directly examine intracellular glucose and lipid metabolism in humans, thus providing a dynamic view of intracellular metabolism for the first time. Using this approach, he found that defects in insulin-stimulated muscle glycogen synthesis, due to defects in glucose transport activity, were the major factors responsible for muscle insulin resistance in individuals with type 2 diabetes and prediabetes.

In another pivotal series of studies, he developed novel methods to measure hepatic glycogenolysis and gluconeogenesis in humans for the first time and demonstrated that increased hepatic gluconeogenesis is responsible for fasting hyperglycemia in type 2 diabetes.