

David P. Cistola, M.D., Ph.D.
Innovator in Preventive Health and Diabetes Research
David P. Cistola, M.D., Ph.D., founded T2YourHealth in 2023 and began working full-time for the company in September 2024 as its Chief Scientific Officer. Prior to that, he had a gratifying 35-year career in academic medicine as a medical research scientist and professor, working in four universities.
From 2016 to 2024, he served as Professor in the Center of Emphasis in Diabetes & Metabolism at the Paul L. Foster School of Medicine, Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center El Paso. There, he led a research laboratory that developed and validated the compact magnetic resonance technologies that are the foundation for T2YourHealth. Dr. Cistola and his research team analyzed human data from the U.S. population and unveiled early metabolic imbalance (EMI), an overlooked diabetes risk factor most common in young people but found in all age groups. Though a hidden condition with no symptoms, EMI is readily detected by plasma and serum water T2. Those discoveries led to 4 sets of national and international patent filings.
Prior to Texas Tech, Dr. Cistola served as Vice President for Research & Innovation and Professor at the University of North Texas Health Science Center in Fort Worth. There, he and his research team made the serendipitous and exciting discovery that plasma and serum water T2 can detect early insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome in disease-free individuals. That work led to U.S. and European patents.
For the previous five years, Dr. Cistola served as Associate Dean for Research and Professor in the College of Allied Health Sciences and the Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina. As Associate Dean, he founded a multi-disciplinary research initiative termed Operation Re-entry, which provided innovative support for military service personnel returning from Iraq and Afghanistan and their families. Also at that time, Dr. Cistola and his research laboratory began their groundbreaking work with benchtop magnetic resonance. That research led to the discovery that T2 monitors lipid and lipoprotein fluidity and metabolic health non-invasively in human blood plasma and serum. Two U.S. patents were issued for that work.
His first faculty positions were as Assistant and Associate Professor at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, where he worked for 18 years. His research lab used high-field magnetic resonance spectroscopy to characterize lipid binding proteins important in metabolism and diabetes. This fundamental molecular-level research with isolated protein samples informed and inspired the later work performed with humans.
Dr. Cistola graduated from the M.D.-Ph.D. program at the Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine. His Ph.D. dissertation research, conducted under the mentorship of James A. Hamilton, Ph.D. and the late Donald M. Small, M.D., utilized nuclear magnetic resonance and other biophysics methods to study how fatty acids are transported in the body. Those processes are fundamental to metabolism and diabetes. The deep scientific experience gained there was the foundation and inspiration for all of his future work. After graduation, Dr. Cistola pursued further research training as a NIH Postdoctoral Fellow in the Biophysics and Cardiovascular Institutes and held the Andrew Costello Fellowship of the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation International.
Dr. Cistola’s Scientific Publications, U.S. National Library of Medicine Bibliography:
Google Scholar Profile:


The Man Behind the Science
Dr. Cistola was born and raised in upstate New York. In high school, he competed on the swim and track teams, gaining skills that he would carry throughout his life. Known only as Dave back then, he aspired to be a jazz trumpeter and composer. Dave quickly learned that his creativity was best expressed through science. Skiing was another early interest, which paid off later when attending scientific conferences at ski areas. Today, Dave enjoys hiking with wife Julie in the mountains of far West Texas and New Mexico, visiting his four sons, lap swimming, and an occasional spin with Julie on the dance floor