Biography

Dr. Kendra Vehik is an Associate Professor at the University of South Florida. Her research is focused on type 1 diabetes including prevention, clinical/translational and quality of life research. Much of her published work has been focused on identifying probable risk factors associated with type 1 diabetes in order to develop more directed hypotheses to prevent the onset of autoimmunity and clinical disease. She has expertise in epidemiologic and biostatistical methodologies associated with case/control, longitudinal and clinical trial designs. Dr. Vehik has firsthand knowledge and experience working with many type 1 clinical projects coordinated by the Pediatric Epidemiology Center, including The Environmental Determinants of Diabetes in the Young (TEDDY), TrialNet Network and the Diabetes Prevention Trial – Type 1 (DPT-1) studies. Her main diabetes expertise lies in identifying stable and informative risk factors and validating the identified risk factors as triggers and/or accelerators of autoimmunity and clinical disease. She has authored many high impact peer-reviewed publications that have focused on determining risk factors associated with type 1 diabetes focused on in utero and early life environmental exposures (body size and growth patterns, nutrition, infections), genetic susceptibility, clinical outcomes in delaying onset and population-based temporal trends in risk factors and type 1 diabetes. Her long time interests are in identifying early life risk factors, exploring how changes in these risk factors over time and potential gene-environment interactions contribute to the risk of autoantibody seroconversion and surrogate biomarkers for prediction, diagnosis and risk of type 1 diabetes, and delaying or stopping the onset of diabetes.