K. M. Venkat Narayan
K. M. Venkat Narayan is an Indian-American physician and epidemiologist. He is the Ruth and O.C. Hubert Professor of Global Health and Epidemiology at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and a professor of medicine and endocrinology at the Emory University School of Medicine. Narayan is the founder and executive director of the Emory Global Diabetes Research Center.
Narayan is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and a foreign fellow of the Indian National Science Academy. In 2015, he was awarded the Kelly West Award.
Education
Narayan received his Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery degree from St. John’s Medical College in Bengaluru, India, in 1980. He later completed postgraduate training in public health and epidemiology in the United Kingdom, earning a Master of Science degree from the University of Edinburgh. He subsequently earned a Master of Business Administration degree from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh.Career
Narayan began his academic career in the United Kingdom, where he held clinical and teaching appointments at the University of Aberdeen and the Grampian Health Board. He later joined the National Institutes of Health as an intramural researcher at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.From the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, he worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, serving as chief of the Epidemiology and Statistics Branch within the Division of Diabetes Translation.
In 2007, Narayan joined Emory University, where he founded the Emory Global Diabetes Research Center in 2022 and later became founding director of the Georgia Center for Diabetes Translation Research. He has also held academic leadership roles at Emory, including interim associate dean for research at the Rollins School of Public Health.
Research
Narayan’s research focuses on diabetes prevention, pathophysiology, clinical trials, quality of health care, and global health translation. He has played a central role in advancing diabetes translation research, which seeks to bridge scientific discovery and real-world clinical and public health implementation.His work includes systematic documentation of type 2 diabetes in youth, highlighting its emergence as a significant public health challenge and emphasizing the importance of early prevention strategies. He led the world’s first assessment of lifetime risk for diabetes, contributing to long-term projections of disease burden used by policymakers and public health planners.
Narayan also led the first comprehensive study of the national incidence of childhood obesity, drawing attention to trends with implications for future diabetes prevalence. More recently, his research has examined insulin-deficient phenotypes within type 2 diabetes, illustrating the heterogeneity of the disease and identifying differences across populations in Asia, Africa, Native American communities, and other low- and middle-income settings.
Honors and recognition
Narayan received the Kelly M. West Award for Outstanding Achievement in Epidemiology from the American Diabetes Association in 2015. In 2016, he was elected a member of the National Academy of Medicine of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. In the same year, he held the Visiting Nehru Chair at the University of Hyderabad.In 2023, he was elected a foreign fellow of the Indian National Science Academy. In 2025, Narayan received the Distinguished International Service in the Cause of Diabetes Award from the American Diabetes Association.