2023 Breakthrough T1D Fellowship Awardees
Anna Korsgaard Berg
Anna Korsgaard Berg, MD, PhD, completed her medical degree at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, in 2019. She continued thereafter her pre-graduate clinical research within Dermatological complications towards the use of Diabetes technology in Children and Adolescents with Type 1 Diabetes in a 3-year Clinical PhD project at both Steno Diabetes Center Copenhagen and Pediatric Department Herlev Hospital in Denmark, which was defended in 2023.
Overall, she has since 2016 worked within the field of pediatric diabetes with special knowledge of Dermatological complications towards device use. In that theme, she has published many key articles and has been invited to speak at ISPAD 2023 and ATTD 2024. She has been a member of ISPAD and the Jenious Group since 2017 and participated in the ISPAD Science School for Physicians in 2021. In 2022, she got even more involved in the Jenious group as overall PI for the SKIN-PEDIC study, an observational multicenter study with more than 22 pediatric diabetes centers globally participating to explore the frequency of dermatological complications. During her research, she supervised four medical students and is currently supervising a Ph.D. student. The findings of the preceding studies were that a skin care program was used to prevent some dermatological complications, but contact dermatitis was still not solved.
She is, therefore, very pleased to be awarded the ISPAD-JDRF Fellowship 2023 as a natural extension of her preceding research under the supervision of Professor Jannet Svensson, with a focus on contact dermatitis. The project's overall goal is that Contact dermatitis does not prohibit any person with diabetes from accessing the optimal treatment to describe contact dermatitis, including handling, investigating skin barrier as a function of occlusion time, and exploring new methods for prevention and treatment of contact dermatitis.
Jantje Weiskorn
Jantje Weiskorn, MD, is a pediatrician and diabetologist currently working at the Children´s Hospital “AUF DER BULT” in Hanover under the mentorship of Prof. Dr. Olga Kordonouri and Prof. Dr. Thomas Danne.
She completed her medical degree at Hanover Medical School (MHH) in 2011. She began her specialist training as a pediatrician in 2012 and graduated in 2018. She was already interested in diabetology during her residency and has worked in the Department of Diabetology and Clinical Research since 2016. She is a study doctor in various research projects on primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention (GPPAD, INNODIA) of type 1 diabetes and new technologies. In recent years, she has increasingly focused on the early detection and treatment of cardiovascular risk factors such as hyperlipidemia, intima-media thickness measurements, and cardiac changes due to diabetes with and without diabetic ketoacidosis.
In 2023, she attended the ISPAD Science School for Physicians in Milano and is an active member of the ISPAD JENIOUS group for young researchers.
She is pleased to be granted the ISPAD-JDRF Fellowship 2023 for the study "Myocardial complications of diabetic ketoacidosis". The following study aims to detect cardiac impairment in the clinical state of ketoacidosis at an early stage and to record its long-term course. Early detection enables regular check-ups, can influence treatment targets for other cardiovascular risk factors such as hyperlipidemia, and can lead to early therapeutic consequences to delay or prevent complications and life-shortening secondary diseases. This research project is being carried out at the Children´s Hospital “AUF DER BULT” in Hanover under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Olga Kordonouri.
Jean Claude Njabou Katte
Dr. Njabou Katte is a Cameroonian-trained general practitioner, public health medicine specialist, and research scientist specializing in global health type 1 diabetes research in sub-Saharan Africa. He works as a research consultant with the Changing Diabetes in Children (CDiC) program in Cameroon. He is also one of the pioneer Translational Research Fellows at the NIHR Exeter Biomedical Research Centre at the University of Exeter.
He completed his medical training in 2011 at the University of Yaounde 1, Cameroon. He worked in one of the regional hospitals, providing care to children and adolescents diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, and he was part of the CDiC program. Over the years, he has provided his support and expertise to numerous education workshops, diabetes camps, and research projects with the CDiC program. As a resident physician in public health, he assessed the implementation of the CDiC program in Cameroon. His PhD research focused on understanding the phenotype, pathogenesis, and survival of children and young adults diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in sub-Saharan Africa.
This ISPAD-JDRF Fellowship with support extended biomarker analysis geared at characterizing type 1 diabetes in sub-Saharan Africa using cohorts of individuals from young-onset diabetes in sub-Saharan Africa (YODA Study, https://classic.clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/study/NCT05013346). He hopes that the results from this research will improve our understanding of the pathogenesis of type 1 diabetes in African populations and lay a foundation for selecting Africans for clinical trials to preserve beta-cells and find a definitive cure for type 1 diabetes.
Rebecca Barber
Over Dr. Rebecca Barber’s twelve years as a pediatric nurse and scientist, she has worked with children and adolescents living with type 1 diabetes in multiple clinical and non-clinical settings. She has worked diligently to contribute to research in diabetes care as a member of the STEM workforce, an area in which women are vastly underrepresented. As a clinician born and raised in Brazil, Dr. Barber observed ongoing challenges in developing tailored education strategies to improve glycemic management in young people with diabetes. In 2018, she completed a one-year predoctoral fellowship at the Joslin Diabetes Center, affiliated with Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts.
During the fellowship, she led multiple studies and co-authored manuscripts addressing important topics in pediatric diabetes education. She next embarked on a new line of independent investigation to understand the impact of macronutrient intake variations on glycemic outcomes in youth with type 1 diabetes using previously collected longitudinal nutrition and CGM data. During her three years of post-doctoral training at Harvard, Dr. Barber took a leading role in three research projects, which resulted in accepted abstracts with posters, podium presentations, and submitted manuscripts. The preliminary findings indicate opportunities for tailored educational programs to teach dynamic glucose management strategies for youth with CGM. Since then, addressing healthcare disparities by leveraging access to diabetes technologies has been one of Dr. Barber’s goals as a nurse scientist and researcher.
As a Research Nurse Scientist with the Institute of Nursing and Interprofessional Research of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, Dr. Barber is uniquely positioned to pursue research priorities identified by clinicians at the hospital. To this end, she has been working with providers at the diabetes clinic on projects examining the use of diabetes technologies. Dr. Barber has been an ISPAD member for over four years and was a co-convenor and faculty of the 2023 ISPAD Science School for Healthcare Professionals in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
