Metabolism Month

Dr. Joseph Bass is the Charles F Kettering Professor of Medicine, and the Chief of the Division of Endocrinology, Metabolism and Molecular Medicine at Northwestern University.

Joseph Bass established links between molecular clocks and metabolism that have been at the forefront of studies of circadian biomedicine. He made the original discovery that disruption of the core molecular circadian clock leads to desynchrony between feeding and sleep cycles and promotes obesity, demonstrating that clock genes are essential for glucose and body weight homeostasis. He subsequently demonstrated that cellular clocks control hunger, insulin secretion, and mitochondrial function, and that an obesogenic diet dissociates clock cycles from the environment, revealing that circadian timing governs metabolic health. He also showed that the circadian clock regulates nucleotide metabolism, in turn modulating day/night cycles of mitochondrial respiration and exercise capacity.

Active as both an endocrinologist and investigator, Bass has opened up a new field that is illuminating how molecular clocks control physiology at different times of day, with a broad range of medical implications including new avenues for treating diabetes and obesity.

The four poster sessions offer young scientists the opportunity to present their work to a wider audience. They will take place between the two lectures, 16:45-17:15.

If you want to present a poster, simply select the option when you register. Please pick a day with a theme that fits your presentation.

You don't have to upload a poster and abstract when you register. When you register you will receive a confirmation email with a link to your registration. Just follow the link and update your registration with the abstract and poster when you are ready.

Posters and abstracts must be uploaded latest ten days before your presentation

Philipp Scherer is Professor and Director of the Touchstone Diabetes Center at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Basel, Switzerland, followed by post-doctoral training the Whitehead Institute at MIT in Cambridge. In 1997, he joined the faculty of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine where he was a Professor for Cell Biology and Medicine. Throughout his career, he has maintained an interest in processes related to cellular and systemic energy homeostasis. He identified adiponectin, one of the first secretory factors to be described that almost exclusively originate in adipose tissue and which is currently widely studied by many different research groups.

Current efforts in his laboratory are focused on the identification and physiological characterization of novel proteins that serve as potential links between the adipocyte, liver, the pancreatic beta cell and the processes of whole body energy homeostasis, inflammation, cancer and cardiovascular disease.

Scherer has been on the faculty of UT Southwestern Medical Center since 2007 as a member of the Department of Internal Medicine. He holds the Touchstone Distinguished Chair in Diabetes Research and is a member of the Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center. He was awarded the 2015 Banting Medal for Scientific Achievement from the American Diabetes Association, the 2017 European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) / Novo Nordisk Foundation Diabetes Prize for Excellence and the 2018 Manpei Suzuki Prize in Japan.

Dr. Bray holds the Susan T. Jastrow Endowed Chair in the Department of Nutritional Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin, with a master’s degree in Exercise Physiology and a PhD in Human and Molecular Genetics.

Dr. Bray’s research focuses on the relationship between genetic variation, energy balance, and lifestyle factors such as exercise, nutrition, and circadian patterns of behavior. Work in her laboratory is designed to identify the mechanisms by which timing and quality of energy intake affects weight gain and metabolic health, in particular through intestinal absorption and the gut microbiome.

Dr. Bray also currently leads one of the largest genetic studies of exercise adherence established to date, the Training Interventions and Genetics of Exercise Response (TIGER) study, with a total cohort of more than 3,500 individuals. Dr. Bray’s research has included investigations of aerobic fitness and resting and exercise energy expenditure in children and adolescents and clinical studies of morbidly obese adolescents undergoing bariatric surgery.