Maike Sander, M.D.

Principal Investigator

Dr. Maike Sander is the Director of the Pediatric Diabetes Research Center and Co-Director of the Center on Diabetes in the Institute of Engineering in Medicine at UC San Diego. She is also a Professor in the Departments of Pediatrics and Cellular & Molecular Medicine at UC San Diego. After graduating with a medical degree from the University of Heidelberg Medical School in Germany, she conducted research at the University of California, San Francisco. Before moving to UC San Diego in 2008, she held faculty positions at Hamburg Medical School, Germany and the University of California, Irvine. Her primary research interest is to understand the molecular mechanisms that underlie the formation and function of the diverse cell types of the pancreas, in particular the insulin-producing beta cells. A recent major focus has been to establish a human pluripotent stem cell-based pancreatic beta cell differentiation platform to model mechanisms that underlie the pathogenesis of diabetes. Her research is supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF). Dr. Sander is an elected member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation, the American Association of Physicians and the German National Academy of Sciences, a member of the NIH-Human Islet Research Network and T2DGENES Consortium, and the recipient of the Grodsky Award from the JDRF and the Humboldt Research Foundation Award.