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Banting Medal for Scientific Achievement
Robert A. Rizza, MD
Robert A. Rizza, MD, from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota received the American Diabetes Association’s prestigious 2010 Banting Medal for Scientific Achievement. The award was presented at the Association’s 70th Scientific Sessions Orlando, Florida.
The Banting Medal for Scientific Achievement Award is the Association’s highest scientific award and honors an individual who has made significant, long term contributions to our understanding of diabetes, its treatment and/or prevention. The award is named after Nobel Prize winner Sir Frederick Banting, who co-discovered insulin treatment for diabetes.
Currently the Earl and Annette R. McDonough Professor of Medicine and the Executive Dean for Research at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, Dr. Rizza has made enduring contributions to our understanding of the pathophysiology of diabetes. In addition, he has remained an active provider of diabetes care and has been a mentor to scores of medical students, medical residents, and clinical trainees, attracting many to the field of diabetes and diabetes research.
Early in his career, in a series of elegant clinical studies, Dr. Rizza elucidated the mechanisms underlying the counterregulatory responses to insulin-induced hypoglycemia. An appreciation that these counterregulatory responses are disturbed in diabetes has led to changes in clinical practice to deliver better care to patients with diabetes.
With their development of validated, sophisticated methods to measure glucose turnover in vivo in humans, the Rizza group was able to quantify for the first time the relative contributions of impaired suppression of hepatic glucose release, impaired hepatic glucose uptake, and impaired glucose uptake by extra-hepatic tissues in humans with diabetes in the fasting and fed state. Thus, the most fundamental questions about the mechanisms of hyperglycemia in diabetes were finally addressed. Later, using innovative approaches in vivo, Dr. Rizza demonstrated that functional hepatic glucokinase defect is basic to impaired hepatic glucose uptake in type 2 diabetes.
Dr. Rizza is a devoted advocate and mentor of the increasingly rare clinical practitioner engaged in research. By example, he encourages rigor and care in designing experiments to test clinically important hypotheses, as well as in preparing the scientific manuscripts to report those studies precisely, logically, and concisely.
As a respected national leader in the field of diabetes, Dr. Rizza has often worked with organizations as a mediator and has been instrumental in fostering cooperation in research and implementating research findings for the common good. He also served as the President of the American Diabetes Association from 2005–2006.
