Dec-2018
Preventing and treating diabetes with a song in his heart
When Hertzel Gerstein was growing up, he loved two things: science and people.
Over the years, those two elements have served as the drivers of his work as a clinician researcher. Today, he is a world-leading endocrinologist and researcher at McMaster University, leading impactful clinical trials on diabetes.
“In university, I was taking science courses and spending my summers working at camps for kids. A career in medicine therefore seemed like a great way to combine people and science,” says Gerstein, professor in the Department of Medicine and director of the division of endocrinology and metabolism at McMaster.
While his lab and epidemiology training was largely in thyroid disease, he started focusing on diabetes and metabolism clinical research shortly after arriving in Hamilton and has never looked back.
Currently, 25 per cent of Gerstein’s time is spent as an endocrinologist and metabolism specialist, where he treats patients with diabetes and endocrine problems at Hamilton Health Sciences’ McMaster University Medical Centre. The remainder of his time is focused on his research.
In addition to his professorial titles, he is deputy director of the Population Health Research Institute (PHRI), the Population Health Institute Chair in Diabetes Research, and director of the Diabetes Care and Research Program at Hamilton Health Sciences.
His personal research program is focused on the prevention and treatment of diabetes and its consequences in adults. Working in collaboration with clinicians and researchers in different fields at McMaster and around the world, he designs and leads large, international trials of therapies related to various aspects of diabetes.
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