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Indian American professor wins Stop Diabetes Award
The American Diabetes Association announced $11.3 million in new Pathway to Stop Diabetes grants for early-career scientists.
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Malvika Choudhary - Tue, 17, Feb 2026
- 11:55 EST
- 34
Sagar Bapat / ucsf.edu
Indian American professor Sagar Bapat was named a recipient of the 2026 Pathway to Stop Diabetes Award by the American Diabetes Association.
The Pathway to Stop Diabetes program supports early-career scientists whose research shows strong potential to transform diabetes prevention and treatment by providing five to seven years of flexible funding and sustained mentorship from senior diabetes researchers.
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Bapat, an assistant professor at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is leading a project titled Living Therapeutics: Development of a novel T cell therapy to enhance thermogenic function of adipose tissue.
The research seeks to develop a targeted cellular therapy using engineered T cells and Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) technology to improve adipose tissue function and address obesity-induced diabetes.
“This award will enable us to pursue a novel type of living T cell-based therapy aimed at modulating adipose tissue function to promote metabolic health,” Bapat said. “By harnessing the unique mobility and functional versatility of T cells, our goal is to restore healthy tissue function and improve insulin sensitivity in metabolic and inflammatory disease.”
A physician-scientist, Bapat’s laboratory studies how diet and everyday behaviors reprogram immune circuits that influence metabolism, tissue physiology, and disease.
Guided by the concept of “Food as Medicine,” his team combines innovative mouse models with functional genomics and genome engineering to examine how nutritional and neuroendocrine cues shape immune cell programs across adipose tissue, skin, lung, and brain, with the aim of identifying mechanisms that promote resilience and prevent illness.
Bapat earned a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University in 2009, completed his MD–PhD at the University of California, San Diego and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in 2017, and finished a residency in clinical pathology at UCSF in 2020.
The seven awards announced this year total $11.3 million and bring the number of Pathway to Stop Diabetes grantees to 50 since the initiative was launched.
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