August 28, 2025 – PhD candidate Mohammadreza (Mo) Ganji has been selected as the Gold Student Research Award winner at this year’s Breakthrough T1D – Diabetes Technology Meeting (DTM) 2025.
His award-winning abstract, “The Glycemia Risk Index (GRI) Predicts Diabetes Complications and Severe Hypoglycemia in the Virtual DCCT,” investigates the relationship between the GRI and the rate of complication development.
The GRI is a recently developed metric that captures the balance between hypoglycemia and hyperglycemia. While it has been validated against clinician ratings, it has not yet been validated against actual long-term clinical outcomes. To achieve this validation, data from large-scale studies such as the landmark Diabetes Control and Complications Trial (DCCT) are required.
Because the DCCT was conducted before continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) technology became available, UVA researchers used advanced machine learning techniques to reconstruct virtual CGM traces for all 1,440 participants across the duration of the 10-year trial ([link to paper]). These reconstructed datasets allowed Ganji to calculate the GRI for each participant at every 6-month visit, using 14 days of virtual CGM data.
His analysis demonstrated that the GRI is significantly correlated with the development of complications, showing that it provides information comparable to established measures such as time-in-range and hemoglobin A1c. These findings highlight the potential of the GRI as a complementary metric for assessing glycemic control in both research and clinical practice.
Co-Authors
Chiara Fabris, PhD., Anas El Fathi, PhD., Benjamin Lobo, PhD., Boris Kovatchev, PhD.