I will talk about how my career was influenced by my mentors and how my career path progressed to evolve into a “bench-to-bedside” approach to finding new treatments and cures for people living with diabetes. My session will end with a discussion of some of my most exciting research, which has allowed me to develop a drug that was screened in a fish model of diabetes, then progressed to mouse models, and is now the focus of a new company that is bringing the drug to human clinical trials.