Yaron Tomer MD

Dr. Yaron Tomer is the Anita and Jack Saltz Chair in Diabetes Research and Professor and University Chair of the Department of Medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore Health System. He received his MD degree magna cum laude from the Sackler School of Medicine of Tel Aviv University and trained in Internal Medicine at Sheba Medical Center, Israel, and in Endocrinology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. Prior to joining Einstein/Montefiore in March 2016, he was Chief of the Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Bone Disease at Mount Sinai.

Dr. Tomer served on the editorial boards of Endocrinology and the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, among others. He is a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and a Fellow of the American College of Physicians. He is the recipient of several prestigious awards, including the American Thyroid Association’s Van Meter Award and the Abbot Thyroid Clinical Research Mentor Award.

Dr. Tomer’s research program focuses on the immunogenetic, epigenetic, and environmental mechanisms underlying thyroid autoimmunity, and type 1 diabetes, and on targeting these mechanisms in order to develop novel therapies. His group made several discoveries including identifying new genes and mechanisms underlying the strong association between type 1 diabetes and autoimmune thyroiditis; demonstrating that CD40 and thyroglobulin are major susceptibility genes for thyroid autoimmunity; identifying a unique amino acid variant in the peptide binding pocket of HLA-DR that is key for the development of thyroid autoimmunity; dissecting the epigenetic mechanisms by which polymorphisms in the thyroglobulin and TSHR genes interact with environmental agents (e.g. viruses) to trigger thyroid autoimmunity; demonstrating that the hepatitis C virus can trigger autoimmune thyroiditis by directly infecting thyroid cells; and identifying a novel small molecule that can block antigen presentation in autoimmune thyroiditis.