Professor, Department of Epigenetics
Van Andel Institute
Van Andel Institute
BIOGRAPHY
J. Andrew Pospisilik is a leading expert in the study of how the epigenome regulates complex trait variation and metabolic disease susceptibility and heterogeneity. He earned his PhD in Physiology from University of British Columbia, where he established for the first time the pre-clinical utility of long-term DPIV inhibitor therapy in models of Type-1 and Type-2 diabetes. As a postdoctoral fellow with Josef Penninger at IMBA Institute of Molecular Biotechnology, he performed the first genome-wide RNAi-screen for obesity in Drosophila, identified some of the first specific developmental regulators of brown adipose tissue formation in mammals, and overturned dogma showing that compromised mitochondrial function actually buffers against diabetes. In 2010, he established his laboratory at Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg, Germany. His lab has made groundbreaking advances including the identification of chromatin-dependent mechanisms for intergenerational programing of disease, development of novel sensitized models for understanding epigenetic variation in metabolic disease; the first formal proof for the existence of polyphenism in mammals, the identification of data-driven obesity sub-types and most recently the identification of two major and epigenetically distinct beta-cell subtypes in mice and humans. In 2018, Dr. Pospisilik joined the Van Andel Institute as a director of its Center for Epigenetics and a founding member of its Metabolic and Nutritional Programming group. He is the recipient of numerous awards and accolades, including the 2011 RISE1 Award from the Epigenesys Network of Excellence, the 2013 EASD Rising Star Award, the 2015 GSK Award for Basic Medical Research, and the 2016 Novo Nordisk Helmholtz Young Investigator Award. He is a member of the World Economic Forum faculty and was recently awarded an NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award for his current work on probabilistic mechanisms of complex disease.
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Saturday, October 28, 2023
11:00 – 12:00 EST