Karin Bornfeldt received her PhD from Linköping University in Sweden in 1991. Later that year, she came to the University of Washington to do a postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Dr. Russell Ross, a leader in the field of cardiovascular medicine.  She also worked closely with Dr. Edwin Krebs on phosphorylation of signal transduction proteins in vascular cells.  She was appointed to the faculty in 1995, and is now Professor of Medicine and Pathology and serves as the Associate Director of the Diabetes and Obesity Center of Excellence and Deputy Director of the Diabetes Research Center.

Dr. Bornfeldt is actively involved in graduate student teaching and has served on more than 20 Doctoral Supervisory Committees in Pathology, Molecular and Cellular Biology, Pharmacology, and Nutritional Sciences.

Dr. Bornfeldt frequently serves on study sections on cardiovascular biology and the complications of diabetes at the NIH and the American Heart Association.  She is a Fellow of the Council of Basic Cardiovascular Sciences, American Heart Association, is Consulting Editor for Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis and Vascular Biology, Associate Editor for Circulation Research, and is or has been a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Circulation Research, Diabetes, and the Journal of Biological Chemistry.