Elizabeth Harris is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Endocrinology and Metabolism.
What is your clinical expertise?
General endocrinology including, but not limited to, type 1 and type 2 diabetes, pre diabetes and preventative management, women’s health including PCOS, and thyroid disease.
Tell us about your current role in the Department of Medicine.
One reason I love my job is that I have resisted becoming focused in any one area within Endocrinology, thus, I have great diversity in what I see and do day to day. The majority of my time is spent in clinical medicine, seeing a mixture of diabetes and general endocrine cases in the outpatient and inpatient setting, both as an individual practitioner, and with fellows. I also help lead the endocrine thyroid biopsy clinic, and participate as an investigator in the Diabetes Clinical Trials program. Perhaps this makes me a jack of all trades, master of none, though I hope it instead helps me remain a well rounded clinician and educator who enjoys and is willing to help out where needed.
What current project or initiative at UNC are you involved in that you are excited about?
UNC inpatient diabetes care is not standardized across the hospital, and has lacked the coordinated effort required between many departments and leaders to improve glycemic control on a larger scale. There is growing awareness of the need to make inpatient glycemic control a hospital wide priority, and it appears we now have some forward momentum. Although implementing a hospital wide glycemic policy will take time, and will continue to be a work in progress, standardization of inpatient diabetes management is the right thing to do, is overdue, will benefit our hospital and, most importantly, our patients.
What do you love most about UNC?
I grew up in the shadow of the Blue Ridge, and was exposed to ACC basketball at an early age — at times suddenly interrupted from my dolls, frightened by the unexpected whoops and hollers from my parents and older siblings in support of Terry Holland and his Cavs, and always against Dean Smith and his Heels. Now as an employee of UNC, a resident of Chapel Hill, and having delivered my two children at UNC Hospital, I embrace the irony of my path. As for Chapel Hill, I love living in a well educated and ethnically diverse area in the South, an area with a small town feel but with the opportunities of a capital city just down the road. An area whose values can be summed up by a trip to our public library. And when it comes to UVA / UNC basketball games, I am not afraid to cheer now, either, though for whom?