[3] She was a post-doctoral fellow at University of Washington, Seattle, under the supervision of Steven Kahn, on a scholarship from the Belgian American Educational Foundation.
She contributed to show that lipotoxicity, the deleterious effect of saturated fatty acids, causes dysfunction and apoptosis[6] of the beta cell.
[7] The monogenic forms of diabetes under study in her group include diseases due to mutations in genes with a role in endoplasmic reticulum stress, mitochondrial function and tRNA biology.
This novel technology provides a unique opportunity to gain insight into the pathways leading to beta cell failure in diabetes and to test novel therapies.
She also coordinates the European Union Horizon 2020 project T2DSystems that aims to develop a systems biomedicine approach for risk identification, prevention and treatment of type 2 diabetes.