2021 George Lyman Duff Memorial Lecturer – Karin Bornfeldt, PhD, FAHA

Karin Bornfeldt’s research is devoted to cardiovascular complications associated with diabetes. Her group uses a combination of human studies, mechanistic mouse models, and cell and molecular biology. She received her PhD in Sweden in 1991, working with an academic endocrinologist (Dr. Hans Arnqvist). Later that year, she came to the University of Washington to do a postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Dr. Russell Ross, a leader in the field of cardiovascular medicine. She also worked closely with Dr. Edwin Krebs on signal transduction in vascular cells. She was appointed to the faculty in 1995, and is now Edwin L. Bierman Professor of Medicine, Division of Metabolism, Endocrinology and Nutrition, and Professor of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology. She serves as Director of the Diabetes Complications Program at the UW Medicine Diabetes Institute, as Deputy Director of the Diabetes Research Center, and as Director of a T32 Training Grant on obesity, nutrition and atherosclerosis.

Dr. Bornfeldt frequently serves on study sections centered on cardiovascular biology at the NIH and the American Heart Association (AHA). She is a Fellow of the AHA, Associate Editor of Circulation Research, Consulting Editor of Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology (ATVB), and Associate Editor of the Journal of Lipid Research. Other honors include the AHA Russell Ross Memorial Lectureship in Vascular Biology (2013), the Edwin L. Bierman Lectureship, American Diabetes Association (2014), the Journal of Lipid Research Lectureship (2019), the ATVB Special Recognition Award in Vascular Biology (2020), and the David Rubenstein Lectureship, Canadian Lipoprotein Conference (2020).