Assiamira Ferrara
Assiamira Ferrara, MD, PhD is a Senior Research Scientist at the Kaiser Permanente Northern California Division of Research and an Affiliate Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of Washington. Her primary focys has been the epidemiology of and translational research related to diabetes and gestational diabetes (GDM). Dr. Ferrara and colleagues have adapted the Diabetes Prevention Program intervention for use in women with GDM during the prenatal and postpartum periods to achieve weight management and reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes. She is currently conducting two RCTs investigating translational diabetes prevention programs, both implemented at the health systems level. Dr. Ferrara directs the Diabetes and Obesity Prevention Core of Health Delivery Systems Center for Diabetes Translational Research at KPNC. She has also led the establishment and maintenance the KPNC Gestational Diabetes and Pregnancy Glucose Tolerance Registry since its inception in 1997; this Registry includes over 500,000 pregnancies and has been a source of data for numberous scientific publications, grant proposals, student projects and quality of care assessments. Dr. Ferrara collaborated with researchers across the nation to further the understanding of sex disparities in the quality of health care for people with diabetes in an attempt to explain the higher risk of CVD mortality in women with diabetes relative to men. She has also worked to determine the safety of diabetes medications in regards to cancer risks. Dr. Ferrara has served as reviewer for NIH study sections and served on the dissertation committees of doctoral students at the University of Washington and the University of California, Berkeley.
Dr. Ferrara is a Co-Investigator on the preventing type 2 diabetes in high risk minority women using automated telephone self management research project. Dr. Ferrara will contribute to the development of the STAR-MOMs intervention as well as the baseline follow up survey instruments, based on recent work with a pGDM post-partum intervention conducted at Kaiser. She will help develop the data analysis plan.
