Obesity and its associated health risks are a major health care concern in the U.S. More than 78 million American adults are considered obese, with a growing number of American children affected as well, according to the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.
In 2013, NHLBI statistics indicated that about 17 percent of U.S. children and adolescents between the ages of 2 and 19 were obese—one in six. Obesity can lead to increased rates of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and certain cancers.
Sir Stephen O’Rahilly, professor of clinical biochemistry and medicine at the University of Cambridge and an authority on human obesity and insulin resistance, will be a guest lecturer at the 2015 Dunham Lecture Series at Harvard Medical School on April 6 and 7.
O’Rahilly is director of the University of Cambridge Metabolic Research Laboratories, co-director of the Institute of Metabolic Science and director of the MRC Metabolic Diseases unit.
A member of the Academy of Medical Sciences and the Royal Society, O’Rahilly is one of the United Kingdom’s most renowned clinical researchers. He is widely known for combining research into the causes of obesity and insulin resistance with clinical practice.
“I have a long-standing interest in the aetiology and pathophysiology of human metabolic and endocrine disease and how such information might be used to improve diagnosis, prognostication, therapy and prevention,” O’Rahilly says on his Cambridge lab website.
According to his nomination to the Royal Society in 2003, O’Rahilly’s “work first established that mutations in a single gene could result in severe human obesity and that these defects largely acted through disruption of central satiety mechanisms.” He was knighted in 2013 for his service to medical research.
O’Rahilly’s 60-minute lecture on Monday, April 6, is entitled “Human Obesity as a Neurobehavioral Disorder: Lessons from Human Genetics.” The lecture will take place in the Joseph B. Martin Conference Center from 4 to 5 p.m. with a reception to follow.
The hour-long Tuesday, April 7, lecture is entitled “Mechanisms of Human Insulin Resistance,” and it will take place from noon to 1 p.m. in the Martin Conference Center at 77 Avenue Louis Pasteur.
Both lectures are free and open to students, faculty and staff of HMS and Harvard University, as well as other interested professionals. Seats are available on a first-come, first-served basis.
Those planning to attend may RSVP to Dunham@hms.harvard.edu by April 1, indicating which lectures they will attend.
The prestigious Dunham Lecture Series was inaugurated at HMS in 1923, established by Mary Dows Dunham in honor of her late husband, Edward Kellogg Dunham (Harvard 1886), to strengthen the bonds of fellowship and understanding among students, investigators and faculty within the medical and basic sciences, for the purpose of advancing medical science in the broadest sense.
Twenty-eight of the 78 biomedical researchers who have been honored with a Dunham lectureship have been Nobel laureates.
