Research

My research focuses on how the brain senses nutritional status and regulates feeding behavior, metabolism, and body weight, mechanisms now central to the next generation of obesity and metabolic disease therapeutics. My early research focused on the hormone leptin, and its role in regulating food intake, body weight, and reproductive function. More recently, our team has focused on how the body detects dietary protein. Protein is an essential nutrient, and animal models clearly detect when protein intake is insufficient. We began focusing on the mechanisms that might underly the detection of dietary protein restriction, leading to the discovery of the hormone FGF21 as a liver-to-brain signal that coordinates adaptive responses to nutritional stress, particularly dietary protein restriction. Our data show that mice lacking FGF21 signaling in the brain cannot detect their protein state, and essentially do not 'know' if they are on a low protein diet.