2022 Breakthrough T1D Fellowship Awardees
Katarina Braune
Dr. Katarina Braune is a board-certified pediatrician and diabetologist with expertise in digital health, interdisciplinary and patient-centric care, and long-standing experience in consulting and patient advocacy.
Living with diabetes for 20+ years, she empowers others and raises awareness about innovations emerging from the patient community as a global advocate and public speaker. As Co-Lead in the Digital Transformation of Charité University Hospital Berlin, her mission is to revolutionize healthcare through a user-led approach, interdisciplinary collaboration, digital technology, and a holistic, person-centered approach to health and well-being.
Dr. Braune attended medical school and completed clinical rotations in Germany, Switzerland, South Africa, Spain, the UK, and Malta. She also completed her residency in pediatrics in 2021. She provided medical support to refugees from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan during the crisis in 2015-2016 and now the Ukraine. She completed fellowships as a visiting postdoc at Steno Diabetes Center Copenhagen and the Stanford Diabetes Research Center.
Dr. Braune is a fellow and representative of the BIH Charité Digital Clinician Scientist program, Head of Medical of #dedoc°, Female Science Talent 2022 of the Falling Walls Foundation, and co-founder of the EU-funded project “OPEN”. This patient-led research project demonstrates the movement and community of people with diabetes called #WeAreNotWaiting and the innovations, such as open-source automated insulin delivery (AID) systems, emerging from it.
Supported by the ISPAD-JDRF Fellowship and mentored by Dr. Rayhan Lal at Stanford, Dr. Braune will work closely with Drew Cooper, neuroscientist and data scientist, to investigate “Synergies in Sleep, Software, and Diabetes Management (SIESTA).” The project aims to investigate how sleep quality is improved in users of open-source AID and whether further improvements can be made through data integration and optimization. Through analysis of the correlations between night-time glycemia of children with diabetes and sleep duration and subjective sleep quality of caregivers, the following questions will be addressed: Does improved sleep of caregivers correlate with clinical outcomes for children? Alternatively, did clinical outcomes improve with the use of AID regardless of changes in sleep quality? Further, which settings and therapy parameters are linked to optimum outcomes for the user?
Committing to the diabetes community’s philosophy of #WeAreNotWaiting and #NothingAboutUsWithoutUs, all project outcomes—including data and data processing strategies—will be openly and publicly shared and discussed with the diabetes community, healthcare professionals, device manufacturers, policymakers and regulators, and scholars in the fields of sleep research, neuroscience, medical sociology, science and technology studies.
Peerzada Ovais Ahmad
Dr. Peerzada Ovais Ahmad, MBBS, PhD, is a Physician Scientist based in Jammu & Kashmir, India. He completed his medical degree in 2012 and his PhD in Endocrinology at Sher-I- Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences (SKIMS) Srinagar, India, in 2021.
Dr. Ovais was awarded the ISPAD Allan Drash Fellowship in 2020. In 2022, he completed his fellowship in the Department of Paediatric Diabetes and Endocrinology, John Hunter Children’s Hospital (JHCH), Newcastle, Australia, under the supervision of Professor Bruce Kin,g where he received education about the SWIIM (Success With Individualised Insulin Management) program, the JHCH diabetes program, which centers around a flexible insulin regime with individualized insulin dosing cards, regular adjustment of insulin doses to maintain BGL in the normal range, and emphasis on routine/daily structure.
Dr. Ovais, Professor Bruce King, and Dr. Carmel Smart adapted SWIIM resources in resource-limited centers. In 2021, Dr. Ovais contacted the Life for a Child program and, along with Professor Shariq Masoodi, arranged support for the Sher-I-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences (SKIMS) to improve the resources available to children living with type 1 diabetes in Kashmir.
Dr Ovais has been an ISPAD member since 2018. He presented his first abstract at the 44th Annual Conference of ISPAD in 2018 and was awarded a special travel grant. Later that year, he was awarded another travel grant to attend the 1st Joint EASD/ISPAD/ESPE postgraduate course on Type 1 Diabetes in Prague, Czech Republic. In 2019, he was selected to attend the 19th ISPAD Science School for Physicians in Rotterdam, Netherlands, and in 2021, he was selected to attend ESPE Diabetes, Obesity, and Metabolism (DOM) School.
He has been a roving reporter’s team member for the ISPAD Annual Conferences from 2019 to 2022, highlights of which are published in the Pediatric Diabetes Journal. Dr Ovais has authored several research articles in international, peer-reviewed journals and has been a reviewer in esteemed journals. Currently, he serves as a member of the ISPAD membership and education committee.
Dr. Ovais is honored to be awarded the ISPAD-JDRF Fellowship 2022. With the generous support of the ISPAD-JDRF Fellowship, Dr. Ovais will conduct the research project “The glycaemic impact of blood glucose monitoring and diabetes education program in youth (aged 0-25 yo) with type 1 diabetes in a resource-limited center” to demonstrate improvement in diabetes-related outcomes after implementing the SWIIM diabetes management program to a resource-limited population.
Timothy Foster
Dr. Foster is a board-certified pediatrician and current third-year pediatric endocrinology fellow at the University of Florida (UF) pursuing a career as a physician-scientist in type 1 diabetes.
Dr. Foster attended medical school at Florida Atlantic University and completed his residency in pediatrics at the University of Florida in 2020. Dr. Foster developed a multidisciplinary collaboration between the UF RNA Engineering Laboratory led by Dr. Elias Sayour within the Preston A. Wells, Jr. Center for Brain Tumor Therapy and the UF Diabetes Institute to create novel mRNA vaccines for type 1 diabetes. He aims to investigate antigen-specific therapies such as proinsulin mRNA vaccines in type 1 diabetes prevention via induction of immune tolerance. As a pediatric fellow investigator, he implemented initial studies with proinsulin mRNA liposome vaccines in the nonobese diabetic (NOD) mouse model with initial success in delaying diabetes.
The 2022 ISPAD-JDRF Fellowship will support further mRNA vaccine studies. With the generous support of this fellowship, Dr. Foster and his research mentor, Dr. Clive Wasserfall, will optimize vaccine dose schedules for proinsulin mRNA liposome vaccines in the NOD mouse model. He will also evaluate the vaccine’s effects on pancreatic insulitis and immune cell profiles. The results of his vaccine optimization studies will add to preclinical data for future support of clinical trials.
He is honored to receive this collaborative ISPAD-JDRF award and grateful for the guidance and support of his mentors at the University of Florida, including Drs. Elias Sayour, Clive Wasserfall, Clayton Mathews, Michael Haller, and Desmond Schatz.
Yempabou Sagna
Yempabou Sagna, MD, is a physician-scientist from Burkina Faso. He works as an adult endocrinologist at Sourô Sanou University Hospital of Bobo-Dioulasso. He holds an appointment as an assistant professor in endocrinology at Nazi BONI University of Bobo-Dioulasso under the supervision of Profs. Macaire S. Ouedraogo, Carole G. Kyelem and T. Marceline Yameogo. After his residency in endocrinology, he completed a university degree in transition from adolescent to adult care in endocrinology in 2017. Since 2018, he has been responsible for managing children and adolescents’ diabetes through the “Life For A Child” Program in Burkina Faso, under the supervision of Profs. Joseph Y Drabo and Oumar Guira. He is also a master's student in pediatric endocrinology from the PEDAF program, a specific training program to compensate for the lack of pediatric endocrinologists in French-speaking African countries.
Dr Sagna has been a member of ISPAD since 2018 and attended the 21st ISPAD Science School for Physicians in Prague (Czech Republic). With the support of the ISPAD-JDRF Research Fellowship, he will conduct as a principal investigator a study to assess the efficacy of a two-daily mixed insulin injection versus a basal-bolus scheme with human insulin for children and adolescents with type 1 diabetes in a limited resource setting.
