Director, OU Health Harold Hamm Diabetes Center University of Oklahoma Health Campus | Oklahoma City, Oklahoma We are pleased to announce that John P. Kirwan, PhD, FACSM has been named the next director of the University of Oklahoma Health Harold Hamm Diabetes Center. Dr. Kirwan’s appointment will be effective September 1, pending approval from the OU Board of Regents.Kirwan joins OU from Pennington Biomedical Research Center at Louisiana State University, where he served as executive director from 2018 to 2025. During that time, he grew the institution’s annual research enterprise from $59 million to $100 million, a 69% increase. He currently serves as executive director of Louisiana's Clinical and Translational Science Center, a million statewide NIH consortium that has generated more than $120 million in grants and awards. Over a career spanning more than four decades, he has secured more than $150 million in research funding, authored 327 peer-reviewed publications, and accumulated more than 113,000 citations, with an H-index of 102, including landmark studies in the New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA. Kirwan is a translational scientist whose work spans precision medicine, clinical programs, community outreach, and international collaborations. He investigates the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying diabetes and metabolic disease. His active NIH R01 grant, DYNAMMO, focuses on the role of skeletal muscle mitochondria in insulin resistance, building on his laboratory’s discovery of a protein called Miro1 that regulates mitochondrial function and may be a therapeutic target for diabetes. Among his most-cited contributions is the STAMPEDE trial, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which demonstrated that bariatric surgery could put type 2 diabetes into remission for some patients and has been cited over 3,500 times. Kirwan also co-founded TransIslet Therapeutics LLC, a biotechnology company developing genetically engineered beta cell transplant therapy as a potential cure for type 1 diabetes and translating basic science discoveries into therapeutic applications. Dr. Kirwan holds a PhD in human bioenergetics from Ball State University, a master’s degree in exercise biochemistry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and completed undergraduate studies at the University of Limerick in Ireland.You may read the full press release about Dr. Kirwan’s appointment here.
