Meghana Gadgil has visited India throughout her life. While she grew up in the New Jersey suburbs, her parents immigrated to New York City in the 1970s, her mother from the state of Maharashtra, her father from the city of Hyderabad. “I used to go to India all the time as a kid to visit family. Being in a new place makes you observe things that you normally might not see. There are so many different foods and languages, which makes the communities very vibrant,” she says. “But there is also a lot of diabetes. And you don’t know why. Everyone is fairly thin and active, yet it filtered through my whole family.” Gadgil wanted to understand why a population that did not fit the typical diabetes mold was nevertheless at higher risk for developing type 2 diabetes.
But this desire for understanding came later. While Gadgil was on the premed track during her undergraduate years at Williams College in Williamstown, MA, she did not realize that she wanted to pursue a career in medicine until after graduating.
“After college, I spent a year with AmeriCorps, with HealthCorps, as a WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) counselor in Seattle,” she says. “I worked with a population of pregnant women and women with kids to provide formative nutrition education.”
She attended medical school at New Jersey Medical School, which is now a part of Rutgers University. Based on her experiences as a counselor, Gadgil initially thought she would focus on women’s health. However, her time with AmeriCorps also triggered an interest in prevention, an interest that crystallized during her general internal medicine fellowship at Johns Hopkins University. “I realized that what I really wanted to do was guide people toward things that would help them prevent disease,” she says. After this realization, Gadgil’s old curiosities about diabetes reemerged.
She is now associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, where her work as a primary care physician informs her role as a researcher.
“A lot of my work has been in observational studies that look at diet and body composition,” she says. “I look at biomarkers called metabolites that are formed from metabolic activities and try to connect these lifestyle factors with cardiovascular disease and diabetes.”
She works with vulnerable populations to prevent diabetes, including women with a history of gestational diabetes, but Gadgil’s research primarily focuses on historically overlooked South Asian populations. “Understanding these mechanisms is important. It’s becoming clear that different people—and perhaps different groups—get to diabetes in different ways,” she says. “We’re getting closer, but we still don’t know why South Asians have higher incidence of cardiovascular disease and diabetes, or why it occurs, on average, 10 years earlier.”
Along with Alka M. Kanaya, MD, Gadgil is a part of the Mediators of Atherosclerosis in South Asians Living in America (MASALA) study, which has confirmed that South Asians are at higher risk for developing diabetes, despite generally favorable lifestyle choices.
“There’s an emerging acceptance that this is a puzzle worth addressing. Why does this disparity in such a huge population exist?” she says. “Ultimately, the goal is to create practical interventions which are tailored to these different groups to be more effective.”
