Professor Stephen O’Rahilly, FRS, MD, FRCP, FRCPath, FMedSci will present this year’s Postdoctoral Association Christmas Lecture.
He is the Head of Department and Professor of Clinical Biochemistry and Medicine at the School of Clinical Medicine, University of Cambridge, and an Honorary Consultant Physician at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge. Prof O’Rahilly is also the Director of the Institute of Metabolic Science Metabolic Research Laboratories at the Addenbrooke’s Hospital site in Cambridge.
His research has been concerned with the elucidation of the basic causes of obesity and Type 2 diabetes. His work has uncovered several previously unrecognised genetic causes of these diseases including some that are amenable to specific treatment. He has a continuing commitment to clinical practice in endocrinology and diabetes and the teaching of clinical medical students, and has made important contributions to the development of infrastructure for clinical research at the Addenbrooke’s Hospital site. He was elected to the Academy of Medical Sciences in 1999, to the Royal Society in 2003 and to the US National Academy of Sciences in 2011.
His talk will reveal how the genetic component of quantitative metabolic traits is complex with a mixture of common alleles of small effect and rarer alleles of larger effect, with the latter being investigated through the study of extreme human phenotypes of obesity and insulin resistance, including lipodystrophy. He will talk about the application of both candidate and hypothesis-free genetic approaches to identify multiple different genetic variants that cause highly penetrant forms of these diseases. The talk will also describe how detailed phenotypic studies of these disorders in humans and relevant murine and cellular models continue to provide new insights into the physiology and pathophysiology of energy balance and metabolism.
Please contact [email protected] to register for this event