Meredith A. Hawkins

Dr. Hawkins specializes in diabetes, with a particular emphasis on the dramatic rise of the disease worldwide. She has traveled the globe investigating diabetes since 1996 and is the founding director of the Global Diabetes Institute (GDI) at Einstein, which conducts diabetes education and training for healthcare workers in South and Central America, Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia.

Dr. Hawkins also studies the role of nutrients and inflammation in the development of prediabetes and diabetes and is currently investigating the impact of vitamin D on the development and management of the disease.

In collaboration with researchers in India, Dr. Hawkins is investigating malnutrition diabetes, a little understood form of the disease that particularly affects the developing world. Dr. Hawkins is one of the organizers of an annual international conference for continuing medical education that alternates between Asia and Africa. Under Dr. Hawkins’ leadership, the GDI has partnered with faculty at Uganda’s leading medical school to improve diabetes care in hospitals and clinics throughout the country. An NIH-funded researcher, Dr. Hawkins has received the Novartis Young Investigator in Diabetes and the Junior Physician Scientist Award of the American Federation of Medical Research.