Alberto Pugliese, MD is an investigator in the research area of type 1 diabetes. After training with George Eisenbarth at the Joslin Diabetes Center and the Barbara Davis Center for Childhood Diabetes, he moved to the Diabetes Research Institute, University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, where he is currently a Professor of Medicine, Microbiology and Immunology. He is the Head of the Immunogenetics Program at the Diabetes Research Institute. During the past 20 years he has been involved in clinical and basic research about the immunology, genetics, prediction and prevention of type 1 diabetes (T1D). Amongst his contributions are the observation that autoantibody-positive relatives maintain an extremely low risk if they carry the HLA-DQB1*0602 allele, which is an exclusion criteria for prevention studies; the discovery that the insulin gene is transcribed in the human thymus, where transcription levels are determined by insulin gene polymorphisms and may influence thymic selection of insulin-specific autoreactive T cells, with relevance to disease pathogenesis; the demonstration of T1D recurrence in pancreas-kidney transplant recipients despite immunosuppression that prevents rejection. Dr. Pugliese is a Steering Committee member of the National Institutes of Health’s Type 1 Diabetes TrialNet, a consortium that designs and implements clinical trials for type 1 diabetes. Finally, he is Executive Co-Director of the JDRF Network for the Pancreatic Organ Donors (nPOD), which through the shared study of donor specimens aims at developing collaborative efforts to investigate key research questions in human type 1 diabetes.