Summary
Job Title: Professor and Head of Section of Cell Biology and Functional Genomics
Research: Signal transduction in the pancreatic β-cell in health and disease - my chief focus is in using functional genomics at the cellular and whole organism level to dissect the role of genes associated with Type 2 diabetes.
Brief Biosketch: After studying for a PhD in Bristol with Dick Denton FRS on mitochondrial Ca2+ signalling, I subsequently worked on the pancreatic β-cell as an MRC travelling Fellow with Claes Wollheim in Geneva. There, working collaboratively with Tullio Pozzan and Rosario Rizzuto in Padua, I established new approaches to exploring the control of insulin release at the single cell level through the use of recombinant target probes and other techniques. I then returned to Bristol, becoming a full Professor of Biochemistry in 2002, and moved to Imperial College in 2006.
My current research is supported by Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator and Royal Society Wolfson Merit Awards, by UK Research Council and Diabetes UK grants, as well as by the European Commission Innovative Medicines Initiative in Diabetes (IMIDIA).
Prizes and Awards: I was awarded the Minkowski Prize of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes in 2004, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation's Mary Jane Krugel Award (2005), a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award (2011), a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award (2012) and the Dorothy Hodgkin Lecturehip of Diabetes UK (2014).
Research Support. Supported by Programme and other grants from the Wellcome Trust, MRC, DUK, JDRF, BBSRC, NIH, BHF and EU.
Related links to Section of Cell Biology and Functional Genomics and Imperial Beta Cell Consortium
Publications
Journals
Dwivedi OP, Lehtovirta M, Hastoy B, et al., 2019, Loss of ZnT8 function protects against diabetes by enhanced insulin secretion., Nature Genetics, Vol:51, ISSN:1061-4036, Pages:1596-1606
Jaafar R, Tran S, Shah A, et al., 2019, mTORC1 to AMPK switching underlies β-cell metabolic plasticity during maturation and diabetes., Journal of Clinical Investigation, Vol:130, ISSN:0021-9738, Pages:4124-4137
Conference
Bitsi S, Buenaventura T, Laughlin WE, et al., 2019, GLP-1R translocation to plasma membrane nanodomains and downstream signalling are modulated by agonist-dependent receptor palmitoylation, 55th Annual Meeting of the European-Association-for-the-Study-of-Diabetes (EASD), SPRINGER, Pages:S215-S215, ISSN:0012-186X
Noriega LL, Sanchez AM, Callingham R, et al., 2019, The long non-coding RNA PAX6-AS1 controls human beta cell identity, 55th Annual Meeting of the European-Association-for-the-Study-of-Diabetes (EASD), SPRINGER, Pages:S205-S206, ISSN:0012-186X
Marselli L, Suleiman M, Colli ML, et al., 2019, The transcriptome of persistent or transient human beta cell dysfunction caused by lipo-glucotoxicity correlates with the gene expression signature of type 2 diabetic islets, 55th Annual Meeting of the European-Association-for-the-Study-of-Diabetes (EASD), SPRINGER, Pages:S167-S167, ISSN:0012-186X