Professor Stephanie Amiel BSc, MBBS, MD, FRCP

Biography

I am an experimental medicine researcher and a clinical diabetes physician. I use multiple methods to investigate clinical problems in diabetes therapies, including hypoglycaemia in insulin therapy, the role of the brain in the control of peripheral metabolism, and the impact of black African ethnicity on the metabolic derangements that lead to type 2 diabetes.  I work collaboratively with colleagues in neuroimaging, nutrition, psychology and education and transplantation to improve outcomes particularly for adults with type 1 diabetes. With Sheffield and North Tyneside, and nursing colleagues from King's College Hospital, I led the King's team in the development of the patient education programme DAFNE, still the only such programme in the UK that is NICE-approved. We continue to work on improvements to the original curriculum. With the King's Liver teams, we also developed islet transplantation at King's for adults with type 1 diabetes and treatment-resistant hypoglycaemia. Physiological and neuroimaging studies followed by qualitative work with people with diabetes led us to conclude that cognitive barriers to hypoglycaemia avoidance may contribute to high risk of severe hypoglycaemia during insulin therapy and we are now running a multi-centre RCT of a novel intervention using cognitive approaches for people who struggle to avoid recurrent severe hypoglycaemia in the management of their type 1 diabetes.

I am a founder member of the International Hypoglycaemia Study Group, which first set out the now widely adopted definitions of hypoglycaemia in diabetes; participated in the development of international guidelines for the use of metabolic surgery in type 2 diabetes and the use of continuous glucose monitoring in improving diabetes outcomes and chaired the NICE guideline development group for the most recent clinical guideline in the diagnosis and management of type 1 diabetes in adults. I am chairman of the Strategic Research Advisory Group for Diabetes UK and am part of the EU IMI initiative HypoRESOLVE, seeking to define hypoglycaemia in terms of its impact on patients' lives. I am a mentor on the European Federation for the Study of Diabetes (EFSD) research mentorship programme and sit on its panel.

My current research is funded by Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, Diabetes UK and the EU.