JDRF Fellowship awarded to Farnsworth

Dr. Nikki Farnsworth, a Research Instructor working in the lab of Dr. Richard Benninger, was recently awarded a Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation Advanced-Postdoctoral Fellowship to study novel mechanisms of pancreatic β-cell death and to exploit these mechanisms to protect against the onset and progression of type 1 diabetes (T1D).

The goals of Dr. Farnsworth’s project are to determine the role of protein kinase C delta in regulating inflammation-mediated β-cell death and to determine the contributions of altered islet interactions with the extracellular matrix to β-cell death in T1D. This study will identify novel mechanisms of β-cell death during the onset of T1D using quantitative live cell imaging and a biomimetic 3D scaffold and will determine if modulation of these novel signaling mechanisms can protect against the onset of T1D.