Prof. Richard David Leslie Queen Mary University of London, UK

Richard David Leslie was elected President of the Association of Physicians of Great Britain and Ireland in 2012. He was a Wellcome Trust Senior Fellow in Clinical Science and an MRC Travelling Fellow. As Principle Investigator of three major European Union programmes (BLUEPRINT, Action LADA and EXALT) he is a... read moreleader in four areas of diabetes research, including the epigenetics and twin studies of autoimmune diabetes, nature of adult-onset autoimmune diabetes and immunotherapy of type 1 diabetes respectively. He was Founding Chairman of T1DUK, a UK national consortium, principle of Action LADA, a European consortium, Director of British Diabetic Twin Study and Director of Mendel Institute, Rome. He first described early environmental events as a cause of type 1 diabetes, persistent immune changes as predictors of diabetes and championed the concept of type 1 diabetes as a broad clinical, genetic and immunological spectrum in which adult-onset autoimmune diabetes is prevalent. He also first reported Genome and Epigenome Wide Association Studies in both adult-onset and childhood-onset type 1 diabetes, heritability determining haemoglobin A1c, early glucose changes in pregnancy associated with congenital malformations and early metabolic changes before the onset of type 2 diabetes.