Boris Kovatchev, PhD, is director of the UVA Center for Diabetes Technology.
Boris Kovatchev, Ph.D., is one of only a handful of Americans and the first-ever mathematician to receive the international Diabetes Technology Leadership Award, presented annually by the Diabetes Technology Society. Dr. Kovatchev, who holds joint appointments as associate professor in the University of Virginia Health System’s Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences and the UVA Department of Systems and Information Engineering, received the award November 15, 2008 at the Society’s Eighth Annual Meeting in Bethesda, Md. He was honored for his significant leadership, vision and research in the application of science and engineering to fight diabetes.
“This award is a great honor, responsibility, and recognition for the work of our Diabetes Technology group at the University of Virginia,” Dr. Kovatchev said at the award presentation. “I want to acknowledge Drs. Stacey Anderson, Marc Breton, Stephen Patek, and Leon Farhi, our project coordinator Pamela Mendosa, the UVA General Clinical Research Center, and my mentors in medicine and engineering Dr. William Clarke and Professor Claudio Cobelli.”
With nearly 15 years of experience in biomathematics, Dr. Kovatchev has received continuous funding since 1996 from the National Institutes of Health, exclusively dedicated to biomathematical modeling for diabetes research. He holds four U.S. patents and ten provisional U.S. patents in the area of diabetes management. He is currently principal investigator on an international Artificial Pancreas Project clinical trial, funded by the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.
Dr. Kovatchev’s many achievements include:
developing the low blood glucose index, the best predictor to date of severe hypoglycemia; creating the theory of risk analysis of blood glucose data; developing new computational tools for assessment of behavioral irregularity associated with type 1 diabetes and for assessment of long-term diabetes control; and developing a remarkably accurate deterministic model of insulin-glucose dynamics.
The Diabetes Technology Society’s annual meeting attracts more than 500 scientists and clinicians from 25 countries and is the second largest scientific diabetes meeting in the U.S., after the American Diabetes Association’s annual Scientific Sessions meeting.
