Diana Athonvarangkul, MD, PhD, instructor of medicine (endocrinology) at Yale School of Medicine, started on her path to medicine—specifically academic medicine—as a child growing up with immigrant parents in New York City.
In middle school, Athonvarangkul was responsible for translating and filling out documents for her non-English-speaking parents . She recalls working with her mother to renew a medical insurance application that had lapsed. Looking back, Athonvarangkul assumes she made an error that resulted in her mother losing insurance coverage, ultimately leading to uncontrolled diabetes.
“It was stressful and shocking,” recalls Athonvarangkul. “That’s how I became interested in diabetes and helping underinsured people.”
She studied nutrition and premedical studies at Cornell. After graduation, she decided she was not quite ready for medical school. She had planned on applying to master’s programs in nutrition when a professor urged her to consider earning a PhD.
“My mentor would only write me a letter if I agreed to apply to PhD programs,” explains Athonvarangkul, “so that’s what I did.”
While in graduate school, the 2010 economic recession hit and Athonvarangkul became increasingly concerned about future job prospects. She transferred into the MD-PhD program at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where she completed her doctoral thesis studying how autophagy, or cellular eating and recycling, in hypothalamic neurons regulates metabolism and contributes to the pathophysiology of diabetes and obesity.
Athonvarangkul came to Yale in 2016 as part of the Physician Scientist Training Program and joined the Section of Endocrinology and Metabolism faculty in 2023, when she received her Yale Center for Clinical Investigation Scholar Award.
She is currently working in the laboratory of John Wysolmerski, MD, studying the role of parathyroid hormone-related protein (PTHrP) and bone physiology during lactation. Women who are breastfeeding experience significant bone loss, with up to a 10-15% reduction in bone density within six months of breastfeeding.
Curiously, lactation-induced bone loss does not lead to pathologic fractures as seen in osteoporosis, another condition of reduced bone density.
“What is going on in the lactating bone that can free up this amount of bone mineral for milk enrichment but not confer fracture risk?” Athonvarangkul asks. The question has stimulated a robust area of research.
Athonvarangkul has found that a particular cell type, the osteocyte, is capable of resorbing little bits of surrounding bone to liberate calcium and other minerals without disrupting the overall architecture. After weaning, the bone not only returns to normal but may be protected against osteoporosis in older age. Her research goal is to understand how lactation-associated bone loss and recovery are regulated so that these mechanisms can be targets for osteoporosis treatment.
While research is her primary focus, Athonvarangkul remains active in the clinical world as well, caring for veterans at the VA in Newington and West Haven, where she works with endocrine fellows and runs the didactics program. She hopes to stay involved in trainee education through the Yale Fellowship in Endocrinology, Diabetes, and Metabolism and the MD-PhD Program at YSM, fostering and developing future career scientists.
Athonvarangkul advises students to be adaptable and flexible and to recognize that a straight approach to achieving goals might not always be the best.
“Have you ever seen 'Forrest Gump'?” she says. “The theme is revealed in the first 30 seconds of the film with that feather floating around. You have to be the feather.”
Endocrinology and Metabolism, one of 10 sections in the Yale Department of Internal Medicine, improves the health of individuals with endocrine and metabolic diseases by advancing scientific knowledge, applying new information to patient care, and training the next generation of physicians and scientists to become leaders in the field. To learn more, visit Endocrinology and Metabolism.