I have several lines of research mostly pertaining to metabolism and metabolic modulation for disease treatment. Several of these metabolic conditions – obesity and type 2 diabetes, disproportionately affect African Americans and/or Hispanic patients. While my first-in-human translational trials have be too small to evaluate a race as an independent variable, I have submitted grants to evaluate the effect of race on a new metabolic biomarker – a ceramide ratio – in a large cohort of African Americans (the Jackson heart study) and to compare this with findings in the Framingham heart study (a predominantly white cohort). This study did not get funded, but we are trying to evaluate ways of re-tooling this grant. Also, I am interested in metabolic modulators for the treatment of cancers that disproportionately affect patients with type 2 diabetes and /or obesity and African Americans – such as colon and prostate cancer. This would open up new avenues for evaluating the role of race on the response to these novel therapies.