Each year, The Baltimore Sun honors women in business, activism, research and more in their Women to Watch issue. This year, Dr. Rita Kalyani, professor in the Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes & Metabolism, was honored for her work focused on diabetes.
From the article:
From an early age, Rita Rastogi Kalyani saw family members in India struggle with diabetes when she took childhood trips to the country where her parents grew up. The chronic disease wasn’t something she’d thought about focusing her career on until she entered the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where she graduated in 2003. Now a professor of medicine in the school’s Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes, & Metabolism and a clinician scientist who sees patients at the Johns Hopkins Comprehensive Diabetes Center, Kalyani focuses on populations most vulnerable to complications from diabetes in her research, including older adults. She founded the Johns Hopkins Patient Guide to Diabetes website in 2016, co-authored two books for people with diabetes and hosts a monthly podcast. In January, she’ll become president of Medicine & Science on the American Diabetes Association’s national board of directors — as only the seventh woman and the first South Asian American woman to do so, she said. “The work that I do has been with the central focus of serving my community,” said Kalyani, who lives in Ellicott City with her husband and two teenage children. “Diabetes affects people of all backgrounds, all ages, all genders, and all races and ethnicities.” About one in every nine people in the U.S. lives with diabetes, she said, and it is a growing public health burden.
