Jason Kim, PhD – Professor, Molecular Medicine, UMass Medical School

Jason K. Kim is Professor of Molecular Medicine and Professor of Medicine in the Division of Endocrinology, Metabolism, and Diabetes at University of Massachusetts Medical School since 2008. Dr. Kim is also Program Director of National Mouse Metabolic Phenotyping Center (MMPC) at UMass Medical School, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), since 2011. Dr. Kim is a graduate of University of California, Irvine in Biological Sciences in 1991 and received his PhD in Physiology & Biophysics from University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine in 1996. After a post-doctoral fellowship at Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Dr. Kim began his academic career as Assistant Professor of Medicine at Yale University School of Medicine in 2002 and became Associate Professor of Cellular & Molecular Physiology at Penn State College of Medicine in 2005, receiving a tenure in 2008. Dr. Kim’s research for more than 25 years has focused on obesity, insulin resistance, and type 2 diabetes, and he has made a significant contribution to the field with 165 peer-reviewed publications, mostly in high-impact scientific journals such as Science, Nature, and Cell Metabolism. Over the past decade, he has largely explored the molecular link between inflammation and insulin resistance using sophisticated in vivo experiments and molecular approaches. As a leading expert on mouse metabolism, Dr. Kim’s NIH-funded research program has investigated more than 400 transgenic mouse models of human diseases and collaborated with numerous academic researchers throughout the world in joint efforts to understand the pathogenesis of diabetes and its complications. Dr. Kim has also worked with many pharmaceutical industries for drug trial studies to identify novel therapeutic targets to treat obesity and type 2 diabetes.