There is a particular kind of stubbornness required to sit across from a patient with a hemoglobin A1c climbing year over year and refuse to simply escalate the medication. It requires believing that something upstream of the prescription can still be changed. That has been the animating conviction of Dr. Mahima Gulati’s career, and it has made her, by her own field’s estimation, a prominent voice in lifestyle medicine and endocrinology.
Dr. Gulati currently serves as Associate Professor of Medicine in the Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes, and Metabolism at UConn Health, where she directs the Lifestyle Medicine endocrinology service line. She is also an adjunct associate professor at the Frank H. Netter MD School of Medicine at Quinnipiac University.
She is a triple board-certified physician, holding certifications in Endocrinology, Diabetes, and Metabolism, in Internal Medicine, and in Lifestyle Medicine through the American Board of Lifestyle Medicine, a combination rare enough that it functions almost as a specialty of its own.
From Jacobi to Utah
Dr. Gulati’s clinical training followed the traditional arc before it bent toward something less conventional. She completed her Internal Medicine internship and residency at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx from 2007 to 2010, including a Women’s Health Track, before moving to the University of Utah Health for Endocrinology, Diabetes, and Metabolism training from 2010 to 2013.
Her University of Utah training included advanced academic-track and chief-fellowship roles. It was during this period, treating patients whose metabolic disease resisted standard management, that she began to focus on what would eventually become her signature approach: treating the disease’s behavioral roots as seriously as its biochemical markers.
Connecticut, and a Decade of Building
After her fellowship, Dr. Gulati joined Western Connecticut Medical Group as an Endocrinology, Diabetes, and Metabolism Attending Physician and Assistant Professor, a role she held from July 2013 to July 2015, before moving to Middlesex Health in 2015.
She then moved to what would become the longer chapter of her career: Middlesex Health, where she served as Senior Attending Physician and Assistant Professor beginning in August 2015, later becoming an Associate Professor in 2022, before leaving in May 2024. At Middlesex Health, she was the founding Director of the Lifestyle Medicine and Lifestyle Endocrinology program.
At UConn Health, she directs the Lifestyle Medicine endocrinology service line, including its Lifestyle Medicine Shared Medical Appointments, a model that treats groups of patients with related metabolic conditions together, allowing behavioral coaching and peer accountability to do work that a fifteen-minute individual visit cannot. She also serves as the chief clinical faculty advisor for the Lifestyle Medicine Interest Group and directs the Lifestyle Medicine curriculum for endocrinology fellows, while contributing to lifestyle-medicine curriculum development across other residency programs.
A Voice in the Guidelines
Dr. Gulati’s influence extends well past Connecticut. She was elected to the Board of Directors of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine in November 2022 and served through November 2025. She also served on the ACLM Executive Committee during 2023–2024, after being nominated by the ACLM president.
She founded the organization’s Endocrinology Member Interest Group and now serves as its co-chair. She has also contributed to ACLM’s research, clinical practice and quality, and marketing and communications work, while serving on its GLP-1 and nutrition messaging task forces.
She holds Fellow status in both the American College of Lifestyle Medicine and the American College of Endocrinology, a dual fellowship that mirrors her dual clinical identity. She also sits on the clinical practice guidelines oversight committee of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinology.
Her published work has helped shape the field’s evidence base and clinical guidance. She was a panel member and co-author of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine’s 2022 expert consensus statement on “Dietary Interventions to Treat Type 2 Diabetes in Adults with a Goal of Remission,” and she co-authored the College’s multidisciplinary clinical practice guideline on “Lifestyle Interventions for Treatment and Remission of Type 2 Diabetes and Prediabetes in Adults,” published in 2025.
Her research has also focused on shared medical appointments and novel clinical practice models for implementing therapeutic lifestyle change in clinical settings, work aimed squarely at the question every hospital administrator eventually asks: can this scale financially, not just clinically?
An Educator in Demand
Dr. Gulati has been invited to speak at more than fifty regional, national, and international conferences and educational programs, addressing both endocrine and lifestyle medicine audiences. It is a speaking record that reflects a career spent translating between two worlds that too rarely talk to each other: the endocrinology clinic, built around pharmacologic titration, and the lifestyle medicine movement, built around behavior change. She has spent more than a decade insisting they are not in competition.
Her recent work reinforces that role as an educator. In March 2026, she co-authored research on using shared medical appointment simulations to teach lifestyle medicine competencies to medical students, extending her clinical model into medical education.
What comes through in the arc of her career, from a Bronx residency to a Utah endocrinology fellowship to two Connecticut institutions and now to UConn Health’s endocrinology service line, is a physician who never treated lifestyle medicine as a separate track from mainstream endocrinology. She built it directly into the specialty’s clinical infrastructure, its training curriculum, and its professional guidance, one shared appointment and one educational program at a time.
