Deborah Wexler is the Associate Director of the BADERC and leads the Pilot and Feasibility Program. She is Chief of the Diabetes Unit at MGH and Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Through her research and mentorship, Dr. Wexler aims to define and achieve optimal treatment, quality of care, and quality of life for people with type 2 diabetes using epidemiologic, clinical trial, and implementation science methodologies and through development and dissemination of guidelines and standards of care. Through her PCORI funded projects, she has also developed expertise in stakeholder engagement in research. She provides consultations on diabetes-related research in these and other areas as part of her BADERC role with special expertise in study design, recruitment/retention, practice-based research, clinical trial implementation, and stakeholder engagement.

Major past and current projects include:
1) GRADE (Glycemia Reduction Approaches in Diabetes: A Comparative Effectiveness) Study Role: MGH Site Principal Investigator; Member of the Executive Committee, and co-chair of the Outcomes Committee. This 37-site trial evaluated the long-term metabolic and clinical effects of four classes of glucose-lowering medications in combination with metformin for the treatment of type 2 diabetes. (https://grade.bsc.gwu.edu)
2) REAL HEALTH-Diabetes Study. This project adapted and implemented a medically supervised, evidence-based group lifestyle change program in usual care settings and found that it yielded clinically significant weight loss, whether delivered in-person or via telephone conference call groups, which increased reach without sacrificing efficacy.
3) Comparative effectiveness of diabetes medications in observational databases. Complementing her work on GRADE, Dr. Wexler has a long-standing collaboration with the PROMISE group of the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology at BWH (https://www.bwhpromise.org).
4) Evaluating the comparative effectiveness of SGLT2 inhibitors and GLP-1 receptor agonists in pragmatic comparative effectiveness trial funded by PCORI. Dr. Wexler is co-leader of the clinical coordinating center of PRECIDENTD (https://precidentd.org)