Francine Kaufman

Vice President of Global Affairs, Medtronic Diabetes

By Isabelle Walker

When the story of the obesity and Type 2 diabetes epidemics in children is finally written, Dr. Francine Kaufman will be one of the heroes.

Few physicians have battled these conditions as relentlessly as Kaufman, a gutsy, outspoken pediatric endocrinologist and medical school professor from Los Angeles. She has cared for thousands of young patients, run diabetes prevention trials for the federal government and led successful campaigns to ban sugary sodas from Los Angeles public schools.

Along the way, she has also taken time to educate hundreds of journalists in the Health Journalism Fellowships about diabetes and diabetes prevention among children.

Kaufman gives the media good marks for its reporting on the dangerous rise of childhood obesity and one of its consequences – Type 2 diabetes. Always the advocate, she encourages journalists to ask diabetes researchers and clinicians hard questions about results. The next big story, she suggests, could be an exploration of how the wealth of clinical data on the effectiveness of prevention can be translated into behavioral changes.

The question, she says, will be this: "Are people able to really do it, and improve their lifestyles?"

Her personal crusade against what she sees as a toxic food environment has extended from the barrios of East Los Angeles to the World Health Organization's 2001 Assembly in Geneva. Kaufman described the obesity-diabetes link through compelling personal stories in her popular 2005 book "Diabesity." In 2007, she made the documentary "Diabetes – A Global Epidemic," for The Discovery Channel. With video crew in tow, she traveled to South Africa, Peru and Brazil to explore how the disease affects people in different cultures.

In 2009, Kaufman became vice president of global affairs at Medtronic Diabetes, a division of Medtronic, Inc., the global medical device giant. The dramatic career shift, from public health to public company executive, came after 30 years at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles, where she headed the Center for Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism, and 11 years as a professor of pediatrics at Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California. At Medtronic, which reported sales of $13.5 billion in 2008, she guides development of an artificial pancreas, the Holy Grail for people suffering from Type 1 diabetes. Kaufman is also using her clinical experience to advise Medtronic's engineers on improving the company's line of insulin pumps and glucose monitors.

"To be honest, I could continue doing the same things – run large clinical trials for the NIH, see thousands of patients, be on every advisory panel there is, write a book," she said. "This was an opportunity to have a different footprint on diabetes."