Gary Cline

Gary W. Cline, PhD, professor emeritus of medicine, spent most of his professional life as a faculty member at Yale, retiring in 2021. After completing his undergraduate studies in biochemistry at the University of Missouri-Columbia, he took a break from academia with a six-year stint in the United States Coast Guard. He then returned to the University of Missouri for a PhD in physical organic chemistry before joining Professor Martin Saunders’s laboratory in Yale’s Chemistry department as a postdoctoral fellow. After many sleepless nights on the NMR measuring the thermodynamics of equilibrium isotope effects, he was recruited to the Yale School of Medicine to help lead the transition from the use of radioisotope tracers to stable isotope tracers. His research focused on the use of stable isotopes in evaluating whole-body and tissue-specific metabolic fluxes in relation to diabetes and obesity. As co-director of the Clinical Metabolism Core for the Yale Diabetes Research Center and the Metabolomics Core for the Yale Mouse Metabolic Phenotyping Center, he helped develop mass spectroscopic and NMR methodologies for calculating whole-body, cellular, and mitochondrial metabolic fluxes in vivo. Another major focus of his research has been to develop PET imaging to evaluate changes in the numbers and function of the insulin-secreting cells of the pancreas. This work has contributed toward identifying the biochemical and physiological mechanisms of impaired insulin secretion, and of hepatic and peripheral insulin resistance experienced by people with T1DM and T2DM.

The 2016 Team Science Award from the National Association for Clinical and Translational Science, recognized Professor Cline’s contributions in team science in translating research discoveries into clinical practice. He co-authored major papers in his field, led significant clinical trials, and for more than fifteen years taught an influential course through the consortium on tracer technology.