JDRF Northern California Center of Excellence will promote collaborative efforts between diabetes researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and Stanford University School of Medicine and will be co-led by Drs. Matthias Hebrok and Seung Kim. Our innovative approaches will maximize and integrate the expertise of type 1 diabetes (T1D) investigators at these two institutions with the overall goal of accelerating growth of basic research foundations essential for developing cell-based therapies for T1D. This work will uniquely benefit from the diverse and complementary expertise of the investigators at UCSF and Stanford to address important and unresolved questions in T1D biology with the intent of translating the findings into novel therapies.