We are delighted to announce that Rexford Ahima will join Johns Hopkins Medicine on as the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Diabetes, director of the Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism, and leader of the Diabetes Initiative at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Dr. Ahima will assume division directorship on June 1, 2016, succeeding Paul Ladenson, who has directed the division with distinction during his long tenure. Dr. Ahima is currently a Professor of Medicine and director of the Obesity Unit at the University of Pennsylvania and serves as director of the Penn Diabetes Research Center’s Mouse Phenotyping, Physiology and Metabolism Core.
Dr. Ahima will continue his research on the relationship between energy stores and the regulation of energy balance by the brain, and how adipokines, myokines, cytokines and other circulating factors act in the brain and other organs in a new laboratory that is located on the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center campus.
Board certified in internal medicine and endocrinology, Dr. Ahima did his intercalated BSc research training in endocrinology at the Middlesex Hospital Medical School in the University of London, and earned his medical degree from the University of Ghana Medical School, and his Ph.D. in neuroscience from Tulane University. After his Ph.D., he completed an internship and residency in internal medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York before completing research and clinical fellowship training at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, and joining the faculty at the Harvard Medical School.
Having published extensively in his field, he is a frequent speaker nationally and abroad. He has published more than 200 articles, reviews and abstracts in peer-reviewed journals, authored and edited several books on obesity, diabetes and metabolism and serves on numerous academic and institutional committees.
Please join us in welcoming Dr. Ahima and his family to Baltimore and Johns Hopkins when they arrive in June.
