Dr. Karen L. Herbst, MD, PhD graduated from the University of Iowa with a PhD in Cell Physiology, then completed a Howard Hughes Fellowship. She graduated with an M.D. from Rush Medical College and did her residency and chief residency at the University of Washington. Dr. Herbst completed a combined research and clinical fellowship in Endocrinology and Metabolism at the University of Washington and is a board-certified in endocrinologist. She had faculty positions at Martin Luther King Drew Medical Center/UCLA, the VA San Diego Health Care System/UCSD, and the University of Arizona. She won the 2019 Lifetime Achievement Award from Tucson Business and was named one of America’s top physicians. You may recognize her as the research physician on Mystery Diagnosis, featuring a man with Dercum’s Disease. She has been working with connective tissue diseases since 2000. In 2019 Dr. Herbst headed a NIH-sponsored conference to establish the standard of care for lipedema and in 2020 she presented new ICD-10 codes for lipedema and Dercum’s disease to the CDC. She continues her passion for helping people as part of Total Lipedema Care in Tucson, Arizona, and helped establish a not-for-profit research organization, Fat and Connective Tissue (FACT) Education and Research.