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Ralph DeFronzo ’64 listed in top 2% of scientists worldwide

January 9, 2025

Ralph DeFronzo ’64 is listed among the top 2% of scientists worldwide in Stanford University’s list of the "World’s Top 2% Scientists." This prestigious list identifies the world's leading researchers based on citations of their published papers as well as a wide range of bibliometric indicators. Specifically, Ralph was ranked number 295 out of 6886 in the top 2%. And in his field of Diabetes, Endocrinology, and Metabolism, Ralph ranks as #5 out of 92,197 worldwide.

Ralph is a professor of medicine and chief of the Diabetes Division at the University of Texas Health Science Center and the deputy director of the Texas Diabetes Institute, in San Antonio, TX. After Yale he went to Harvard Medical School and then completed his training in internal medicine at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, MD. He completed fellowships in endocrinology at the National Institutes of Health and Baltimore City Hospitals and in nephrology at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Subsequently, he joined the faculty at the Yale University School of Medicine (1975–1988) as an assistant/associate professor before moving to Texas and taking up his present roles in 1988.

His major interests focus on the pathogenesis and treatment of type 2 diabetes and the central role of insulin resistance in the metabolic-cardiovascular cluster of disorders known collectively as the insulin resistance syndrome.

For his work in this area, Ralph received the prestigious Lilly Award (1987) from the American Diabetes Association (ADA), the Banting Lectureship (1988) from the Canadian Diabetes Association, the Novartis Award (2003) for outstanding clinical investigation worldwide, and many other national and international awards.

With more than 800 articles published in peer-reviewed medical journals, Ralph is a distinguished clinician, teacher, and investigator who has been an invited speaker at numerous major national and international conferences on diabetes.