Dr. Atkinson is currently the American Diabetes Association Eminent Scholar for Diabetes Research and the Jeffrey Keene Family Professor at The University of Florida. He also is the Director of the Diabetes Institute at UF. The author of nearly 600 publications, Dr. Atkinson is beginning his 37th year of investigation into the field of type 1 diabetes. Dr. Atkinson has been the recipient of multiple scientific and humanitarian based awards for these efforts. Those include each of the three from the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF). The first was the Gerold and Gayla Grodsky award (2001) provided to the outstanding Ph.D. investigating type 1 diabetes. He is a three-time recipient of the Mary Tyler Moore & S. Robert Levine M.D. award for translational research on type 1 diabetes (2004, 2008, and 2014). He was also the recipient of the JDRF’s David Rumbough award for contributions to diabetes research (2005) and the prestigious Eli Lilly Award for Outstanding Scientific Achievement from the American Diabetes Association (ADA) (2004). He also received the Barbara Davis Award for contributions to the field seeking to prevent type 1 diabetes (2015), the Claes Hellerström Award (Sweden) for his efforts promoting pancreas research in this disease (2016), and the 2016 recipient of the outstanding alumni award from his alma mater (The University of Michigan-Dearborn). Most recently, he received the UF College of Medicine Lifetime Achievement Award (2018), the ADA Humanitarian Award (2018) and the ADA Albert Renold Award (2018), College of Medicine Wall of Fame Award (2019), and the Jacobaeus Award from the Novo Nordisk Foundation (2019; the most prestigious international award in Endocrinology and Metabolism).