Meet the Team: Dr. Katie Love, MD

Dr. Katie Love, MD

Endocrinologist & Associate Investigator
AdventHealth Translational Research Institute

For Dr. Katie Love, medicine was never just a career choice, it was a calling shaped by her own life.

Dr. Love was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at just four years old. After weeks of intense thirst and frequent trips to the bathroom, her blood sugar was found to be over 500, and she was rushed to the hospital. Like many families facing a Type 1 diabetes diagnosis, hers quickly learned there was no quick fix, no antibiotic, no cure. When Dr. Love asked her doctor when she would get better, she was told this was a condition she would manage for the rest of her life.

That moment changed everything.

“I knew when I was four years old that I wanted to go into medicine and improve care for people like me,” she says.

Growing up with Type 1 diabetes forced responsibility at an early age and shaped how she viewed health, science, and the unanswered questions surrounding chronic disease. While managing diabetes became part of her daily life, it also sparked a deeper curiosity: Why do people with Type 1 diabetes face such high cardiovascular risk? And how can that risk be reduced?

Those questions now define her work.

Dr. Love earned her undergraduate degree at Emory University, completed medical school at Florida State University, and went on to residency and fellowship training at the University of Virginia. She remained on faculty there for five years, focusing on vascular and cardiovascular research in people with Type 1 diabetes, before joining AdventHealth.

Today, her research sits at the intersection of heart health and Type 1 diabetes. She studies how interventions such as exercise and medications can improve blood vessel health, and she leads large-scale “big data” research analyzing databases that include nearly one million people with Type 1 diabetes. This work allows her team to explore long-term cardiovascular risk, potential benefits of emerging therapies, and even possible harms that smaller studies may miss.

“Being a physician really informs my research questions,” Dr. Love explains. “And research helps me provide better, cutting-edge care for my patients.”

Her excitement for the future is clear. Dr. Love believes the next decade will bring major advances in cardiovascular prevention for people with Type 1 Diabetes, driven by new therapies and smarter use of data … progress that once seemed out of reach when she was a child.

Outside the lab and clinic, Dr. Love is also a wife and a mother to two young children. Raising kids the same age she was when she was diagnosed has given her a deeper appreciation for what families face and the motivation to improve care for future generations.

For Dr. Katie Love, the mission is deeply personal: to make life with Type 1 diabetes healthier, easier, and longer, not just for her patients, but for millions of people living with the disease.