NEW YORK – October 29, 2026 -- Breakthrough T1D, the global type 1 diabetes (T1D) research and advocacy organization, has presented four awards to researchers whose work spans disease prevention, insulin pump therapy, beta cell biology and large-scale clinical trials. The recipients were recognized at a ceremony in Philadelphia earlier in October 2026.
Chief Scientific Officer Sanjoy Dutta, Ph.D., said the honorees embody the organization's mission "to accelerate research toward cures for type 1 diabetes while improving the lives of those who live with it."
Greenbaum receives the George Eisenbarth Award for prevention work spanning almost four decades
Carla Greenbaum, M.D., is an endocrinologist in the Center for Interventional Immunology at Benaroya Research Institute in Seattle. She conducted some of the first studies showing that autoantibodies predict T1D years before clinical diagnosis. In the 1990s she served as clinical center director of the Northwest Diabetes Prevention Trial (DPT-1).
Greenbaum later served as vice chair and then chair of Diabetes TrialNet, the NIH-sponsored international network that ran the landmark trial showing teplizumab delayed the onset of stage 3 T1D. She is now Co-Director of the Diabetes TrialNet Clinical Hub and sits on the Scientific Advisory Board of the NIH-funded Immune Tolerance Network.
Tamborlane wins the David Rumbough Award for insulin pump research
William Tamborlane, M.D., conducted a groundbreaking study of the portable insulin pump in people with T1D. He held that reaching glycemic targets would prevent long-term complications. The Diabetes Control and Complications Trial (DCCT) later confirmed this principle, with results published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1993.
His curriculum vitae listed more than 1,000 articles, book chapters and guidance documents when he retired from Yale School of Medicine. He has received more than 25 national and international honors. These include the 2006 JDRF Mary Tyler Moore and S. Robert Levine, M.D., Excellence in Clinical Research Award and the 2017 American Diabetes Association Outstanding Achievement in Clinical Diabetes Research Award.
Thompson earns the Robert Goldstein Award for senescence research in beta cells
Peter Thompson, Ph.D., is associate professor of physiology and pathophysiology at the University of Manitoba's Max Rady College of Medicine and a research scientist at the Children's Hospital Research Institute of Manitoba. He completed his Ph.D. in medical genetics at the University of British Columbia in 2016 and his postdoctoral training at the University of California San Francisco Diabetes Center in 2020. He established his independent program at Manitoba the same year.
His work examines senescence as a mechanism behind beta cell dysfunction in T1D and as a potential target for disease-modifying therapies. Funding comes from Breakthrough T1D Canada, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and Diabetes Canada.
Beck receives the Mary Tyler Moore and S. Robert Levine Award after directing trials for 25 years
Roy Beck, M.D., Ph.D., has more than 35 years of experience directing multi-center clinical trials. He founded the JAEB Center for Health Research in Tampa, Florida, in 1993 and serves as its Medical Director. Diabetes became a major focus after one of his children developed T1D in the 1990s.
Over the last 25 years, Beck has directed the coordinating centers for the NIH-funded Diabetes Research in Children Network, the JDRF Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM) Randomized Trial, the Pediatric Diabetes Consortium and the Type 1 Diabetes Exchange. He has also led numerous CGM, automated insulin delivery and drug studies funded by NIH, Breakthrough T1D, the Helmsley Charitable Trust and industry. He has authored or co-authored more than 600 manuscripts. The award was established in 2004.