When her father died 2 years ago, Vanita R. Aroda found a renewed interest in her family history. While she grew up in Orange County, CA, her father had immigrated from India in the 1960s to pursue a career in textiles. “One thing I learned is that my father’s family was against receiving a dowry. My grandmother was widowed at a young age and encouraged higher education equally for her sons and daughters. They really valued education and that was what they sought in a daughter-in-law,” Aroda says. This describes her mother, one of the first women at her college to study electrical engineering. “Back in those days, women got married early, but my mother’s family saw that she excelled in mathematics and encouraged her to pursue higher education,” Aroda says. “A thing I appreciate about my family heritage—they were progressively open-minded.”
Naturally, Aroda’s own education was always a priority. She went on to earn a degree in molecular, cellular, and developmental biology from the University of California, Los Angeles, then went to University of California, San Diego, for medical school, residency, and, ultimately, an endocrinology fellowship.
During her time at UC San Diego, Aroda found a mentor who shared the open-minded values of her upbringing. “Dr. Robert Henry,” she says. “In academia, you’re often told to be a certain way. But he didn’t pigeonhole me. He allowed me to find what interested me, and then helped create pathways.
“Just like with my parents,” she adds, “he made me feel that I could do anything I wanted.”
Her focus, she decided, would be diabetes. “In medical school, I was drawn toward the geriatric patients. They all had a list of 20 medications they were on, and it seemed like they could use a caring touch to help simplify it for them,” Aroda says. “I realized that the key place to prevent these complexities—where you can make a difference for someone for the rest of their lives—was in diabetes.”
With the help of her mentor, Aroda set up the first obesity treatment program at the Veterans Administration hospital in San Diego. She spent a decade at Georgetown University School of Medicine before joining Harvard Medical School, where she is currently an associate professor of medicine and director of diabetes clinical research in the Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes, and Hypertension at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
“At the clinical end, I care for patients, but my predominant role is as a clinical trial investigator,” she says. “I am part of large-scale forward-looking trials evaluating novel therapies to either treat diabetes, prevent diabetes, or affect the long-term outcomes for people impacted by diabetes and obesity.”
Most importantly, Aroda is interested in how these individual therapies can work holistically. Recently she worked on the American Diabetes Association–European Association for the Study of Diabetes Management of Hyperglycemia Consensus Working Group to draft international guidance, and she has served as a member of the Professional Practice Committee for the American Diabetes Association’s “Standards of Care in Diabetes.”
“We really took a step back from the guidelines on therapeutics to ask—is this about specific drugs or the patient as a whole?” she says. “We mapped out shared goals and really broke tradition to make it person centered.”
However, one of Aroda’s favorite roles is as a mentor, paying forward the same kind of receptive support that she received.
“I help early-career individuals as they’re discovering themselves and their own passions,” she says. “I want to know what they’re interested in and help them carve out their own career trajectories. And in every conversation I hear the voice and message of my own family heritage and mentors echoing forward: ‘Yes.’”
