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Raul A. Bastarrachea, MD, FTSO, is a physician-scientist recently recruited to SDRI as a Senior Research Scientist. He has served as a faculty member of the Texas Biomedical Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas for the last 18 years and will continue to maintain an appointment there as an Adjunct Professor.

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Dr. Bastarrachea has considerable expertise in conducting studies evaluating the metabolic complications associated with obesity and diabetes and in the genetics of complex metabolic traits. He is the lead investigator of a Binational Mexico–United States Research Consortium, entitled “Genetics of Metabolic Disease in Mexico (GEMM Family Study),” that is studying the genetic underpinnings of metabolic dysfunction and diabetes in Mexicans. He has also developed novel and sophisticated stable isotope tracer methods to study the regulation of glucose and fatty acid metabolism in baboons that have experimentally-induced type 1 diabetes, type 2 diabetes and obesity, including the euglycemic-hyperinsulinemic clamp procedure and mixed-meal metabolic challenge test that can be applied to research conducted in people.

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Dr. Bastarrachea will support existing research projects that involve Mil Familias and diabetes in pregnancy, while developing his own research program in nutrition and metabolism in diabetes and other metabolic complications of obesity. He will also develop an annual joint SDRI-Mexico/Latin America diabetes and obesity conference, which is planned to begin in 2022.