Katherine Samaras: Starve to Survive

Katherine Samaras is a senior staff specialist in endocrinology and metabolism at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney. Her everyday clinical medicine and research revolves around diabetes and obesity. This research is helping to unravel the mysteries of fat tissue and how it affects our health, particularly how inflammation promotes different diseases, including diabetes, heart failure, cognition and dementia.

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ABOUT Katherine Samaras

“In the past she has worked at leading overseas institutions, including an appointment as a visiting scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health Boston and at St Thomas’ Hospital in London. She has been actively involved in the treatment of diabetes and obesity since becoming a specialist in 1996.

Katherine has served as a Council Member and Treasurer for the Australasian Society for the Study of Obesity and was Chair of the Specialist Advisory Committee of Endocrinology for the Royal Australian College of Physicians, where she contributed to the curriculum of training in diabetes and obesity, recognising that the majority of diabetes afflicting Australians today is promoted by obesity.

Prof Samaras is actively involved in translating the latest research findings into clinical practice and promoting best practice management in diabetes. Her research focuses on the bench-to-bedside approach, investigating how mechanisms that produce diabetes. Her areas of interest include obesity, diabetes risk, insulin resistance, insulin secretion, metabolic syndrome and endocrine complications of HIV-infection and its treatment.

Professor Samaras is also the Director of a multidisciplinary clinic that addresses obesity in people with diabetes and other health problems, The Australian Centre for Metabolic Health, based at St Vincent’s Clinic.”

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