Metabolism is the set of life-sustaining chemical reactions in organisms. The three main functions of metabolism are: the conversion of the energy in food to energy available to run cellular processes; the conversion of food to building blocks of proteins, lipids, nucleic acids, and some carbohydrates; and the elimination of metabolic wastes. These enzyme-catalyzed reactions allow organisms to grow and reproduce, maintain their structures, and respond to their environments. The word metabolism can also refer to the sum of all chemical reactions that occur in living organisms, including digestion and the transportation of substances into and between different cells, in which case the above described set of reactions within the cells is called intermediary metabolism.
Adiponectin is a protein hormone and adipokine, which is involved in regulating glucose levels and fatty acid breakdown. In humans, it is encoded by the ADIPOQ gene and is produced primarily in adipose tissue, but also in muscle and even in the brain.
William E.M. Lands is an American nutritional biochemist who is among the world's foremost authorities on essential fatty acids.
Long-chain fatty acid transport protein 1 (FATP1) is a protein that in humans is encoded by the SLC27A1 gene.
Daniel Willett Foster was the John Denis McGarry, Ph.D. Distinguished Chair in Diabetes and Metabolic Research and Professor of Internal Medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School at Dallas. He was Chairman of the Department of Internal Medicine for 16 years. He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies. He was a Master of the American College of Physicians. He was also a former member of the President's Council on Bioethics.
George F. Cahill Jr. was an American scientist who significantly advanced the diabetes mellitus research of the 20th century. He focused on metabolic research, especially concerning human glucose metabolism in diabetic and normal conditions; he also investigated the effect of hunger and fasting on metabolic pathways and ketose processes. He was author and co-author of nearly 200 articles in scientific magazines and books.
Carl Ronald Kahn is an American physician and scientist, best known for his work with insulin receptors and insulin resistance in diabetes and obesity. He is the Chief Academic Officer at Joslin Diabetes Center, the Mary K. Iacocca Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1999.
Tobias C. Walther is the chair of the cell biology program at Sloan Kettering Institute in New York City and a professor at Weill Cornell School of Medicine, where he co-directs the Farese and Walther lab. He has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator since 2015. His primary responsibilities are to provide leadership in research and teaching in the scientific fields of metabolism, membrane biology and lipids.
Matthias H. Tschöp is a German physician and scientist. He is the chief executive officer and scientific director of Helmholtz Zentrum München, German Research Center for Environmental Health. He is also Alexander von Humboldt Professor and chair of metabolic diseases at Technical University of Munich and serves as an adjunct professor at Yale University.
Guenther Boden was a German-born American endocrinologist and diabetes researcher who helped link insulin resistance with fatty acids in the blood. Dr. Boden was born in Ludwigshafen, Germany on January 8, 1935. He received an M.S. from Heidelberg University in 1956 and an M.D. from Munich University, School of Medicine in 1959. Boden completed a doctoral thesis at the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry in Munich in 1960. Boden completed a postdoctoral fellowship in biochemistry at Tuebingen University in Germany in 1965. He then continued his medical practice and studies in the United States. Boden was a research fellow in Medicine at the E.P. Joslin Research Laboratory, Harvard Medical School from 1965–1967, where he also served as Assistant in Medicine at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. He then assumed the position of Assistant and Associate Resident in Medicine at Rochester General Hospital.
Gökhan S. Hotamisligil is a Turkish-American physician scientist; James Stevens Simmons Chair of Genetics and Metabolism at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH); Director of the Sabri Ülker Center for Metabolic Research and associate member of Harvard-MIT Broad Institute, Harvard Stem Cell Institute and the Joslin Diabetes Center.
Ruma Banerjee is a professor of enzymology and biological chemistry at the University of Michigan Medical School. She is an experimentalist whose research has focused on unusual cofactors in enzymology.
Barbara B. Kahn is an endocrinologist and the George Richards Minot professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. She is also the vice chair for research strategy in the department of medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and was formerly the chief of the Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes, and Metabolism at Beth Israel Deaconess. Her research focuses on insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes.
Rexford Sefah Ahima is a professor of medicine, Public Health and Nursing; Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Diabetes at the Johns Hopkins Medical School; and the Director of the Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Ahima's research focuses on central and peripheral actions of adipocyte hormones in energy homeostasis, and glucose and lipid metabolism.
Steven Grinspoon is an American physician who is a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Chief of the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Metabolism Unit and Director of the Nutrition Obesity Research Center at Harvard. In addition, he is the MGH Endowed Chair in Neuroendocrinology and Metabolism. His work investigates the neuroendocrine regulation of body composition, and physiologic consequences of fat distribution on cardiovascular disease and inflammation. In 2015, he became the Principal Investigator of the NIH-funded Nutrition Obesity Research Center at Harvard.
Robert V. Farese, Jr., is an American physician-scientist and professor of Cell Biology at the Sloan Kettering Institute of Memorial Sloan Kettering. He is an internationally recognized leader in the study of cellular lipid metabolism and has made seminal contributions to our understanding of energy storage as triglycerides in cellular organelles called lipid droplets.
Franz Maximilian Matschinsky was a German-American medical doctor, pharmacologist, and biochemist. He conducted research in the field of insulin secretion and diabetes therapy.
Eleftheria Maratos-Flier is an American endocrinologist, and emerita Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, best known for her expertise in the pathophysiology and prevention of obesity-related metabolic disorders, and for her discoveries on the neuroendocrine control of feeding behaviour. She is a contributing author to known textbooks and reviews in internal medicine, endocrinology, and physiology. Her marriage with professor Jeffrey Flier, was noted by Forbes as a lasting and productive bond between eminent medical scholars. They have two adult daughters who are also physicians. She is also known as Terry Maratos-Flier.
Deborah Marie Muoio is the George Barth Geller Distinguished Professor of Cardiovascular Disease at Duke University. She is known for her work on diabetes, obesity, and metabolism.
