EP196: Advocating for Diabetes Advocacy, With Kelly Close, Founder of the diaTribe Foundation and dQ&A

Kelly Close founded Close Concerns in 2002; its mission is to make everyone smarter about diabetes. At Close Concerns, Kelly and her team write approximately three million words each year on diabetes, prediabetes, obesity, and digital health for Closer Look, a highly praised service covering the goings-on in the field. Kelly's passion for the field comes from her extensive professional work as well as from her personal experience, having had diabetes for over 30 years. Kelly is the author of more than 30 peer-reviewed manuscripts as well as Targeting a Cure for Type 1 Diabetes: How Long Do We Have to Wait?, a widely praised book published by the American Diabetes Association (ADA) in 2013. She also wrote the foreword for the widely praised Bright Spots & Landmines by Adam Brown, published in 2017. Kelly is an associate editor of Clinical Diabetes, a journal focused on diabetes for primary care physicians published quarterly by the ADA. Close Concerns is a winner of the ADA’s “Excellence in Health Communications” Award, and Kelly and her team write a quarterly column in Journal of Diabetes, a peer-reviewed journal based in Shanghai.

Kelly chairs the diaTribe Foundation, a nonprofit established in 2013 to improve the lives of people with diabetes and prediabetes and to advocate for action. She is also the founder of diaTribe.org, begun in 2006 as an educational resource for people with diabetes; diaTribe.org’s free educational mailers go to over 100,000 people every 2 weeks. Before starting Close Concerns and the diaTribe Foundation, Kelly’s work focused on life sciences more broadly. Over nearly a dozen years, she worked on Wall Street (investment banking at Goldman Sachs, equity research at Merrill Lynch) and at McKinsey & Company, where her work centered on life science, managed care, and nonprofit organizations.

You can learn more by going to diatribe.org, follow diaTribe on Facebook and Twitter, and check out diatribe.org/foundation and diatribe.org/brightspots.