Research Profile

Our research is focused on health disparities and how to enhance diabetes management in underserved populations. We are so excited to collaborate with our community partner, Sea Mar Community Health Centers, that works extensively with the LatinX population in Washington State. We are looking at an innovative curriculum that is culturally tailored to the LatinX community coupled with the use of continuous glucose monitoring. In order to improve access to this diabetes education, we will be delivering this education on a telemedicine platform and using Promotores (community health workers) to enhance the delivery. In our study, we will also be investigating if there are barriers in the community such as food inequity and neighborhood safety that may make the intervention less effective. We will not be curing diabetes, but we will be empowering people with knowledge and a tool—the continuous glucose monitor (CGM)—to improve diabetes outcomes.

Living with diabetes is about figuring out how to be your "best person living with diabetes." Diabetes education is a cornerstone for understanding your diabetes; we have learned that we really need to individualize care for diabetes. In our research we are looking at if a specifically tailored education program for the Latinx community helps improve diabetes. Continuous glucose monitoring is a tool that will potentially help you understand how your body responds to food, exercise and diabetes medications. We hope to show that use of CGM during the education improves your diabetes and lifestyle choices. If successful, we hope that this short-term improvement could lead to long-term benefit and thus decrease your risk for diabetes complications in the future. However, that would be the next study if this study is successful.

As an Army veteran I saw a lot of disparities for those living with diabetes, but I also saw that the military provided a lot of opportunity. I hope our award will highlight the need to tailor diabetes education to be culturally specific so the education can be more effective in one of our most vulnerable populations. Additionally, I hope our research helps makes CGM available to a larger, more diverse portion of the population, specifically those not on multiple daily doses of insulin.

I believe diabetes research is heading in two directions: 1) innovation with new medications and technology, and 2) novel mechanisms that may cure diabetes. However, at least until there is a cure for diabetes, I do think we as researchers need to ensure we include social determinates of health and health inequity in research, because in our diabetes research, so much of living successfully with diabetes is related to their environment and social determinates of heath. Finally, we want to ensure diabetes researchers are from diverse backgrounds. That is why I am so lucky to have my colleagues join me in this effort: Lorena Wright, MD, (Mexican American), Director of the Diabetes Latinx Clinic at the University of Washington (UW); Dr. Laura Montour, MD (Mohawk), a family medicine and obesity-boarded physician; Dr. Ka`imi A. Sinclair, PhD, MPH, (Cherokee) who is an Associate Professor at the Institute for Research and Education to Advance Community Health (IREACH), Washington State University; and Peter Berberian, MD and Director, Sea Mar Burien Medical Clinic.