Diabetes rates are soaring, plaguing more than 400 million people worldwide. Russ Berrie, who had diabetes himself, was prescient in his understanding of the magnitude of this problem. To address it, he funded the creation of the Naomi Berrie Diabetes Center at Columbia University Medical Center, which has become one of the world’s premier diabetes facilities. The Berrie Center is premised on the idea of “the care till the cure,” providing patients with superb holistic, humanistic care while also producing some of the most exciting research in the field. In recent years, The Russell Berrie Foundation has widened its lens on the disease, partnering with institutions such as Columbia University Irving Medical Center and Bar Ilan University’s SPHERE initiative to explore new modalities for prevention and education within health care facilities and in communities.  

Selected Recent Grants

Naomi Berrie Diabetes Center To motivate young scientists to pursue innovative diabetes and related research by funding their work through the Naomi Berrie Award for Achievement in Diabetes Research, and to gather 200 leading scientists, students and clinicians for the annual Frontiers in Diabetes Research Symposium.

The Russell Berrie Galilee Diabetes SPHERE at Bar Ilan University’s Azrieli Faculty of Medicine To establish a transdisciplinary diabetes research and health promotion program that will confer sustained benefit to the health and well‐being of the population of Israel’s Galilee region and to generate global impact through transformative advances in the prevention and treatment of diabetes. 

Columbia University’s Emergency Medicine Department, Jaharis Simulation Center, and the Naomi Berrie Diabetes Center To enable a diverse array of medical students, residents, fellows, and others to improve their recognition and management of diabetic emergencies through a state-of-the-art interactive simulation curriculum.

Bergen Volunteer Medical Initiative To provide free diabetes prevention, treatment, and education services to low-income, uninsured and under-insured residents of Bergen County at its Hackensack, N.J. site and at a soon-to-be-launched satellite clinic in Garfield, N.J.

Obesity Research Initiative at Columbia University Irving Medical Center To support groundbreaking interdisciplinary research on the relationship between metabolism and neuroscience, a new frontier in understanding a major contributing factor to diabetes.