Jean Andrews Centennial Faculty Lectureship

Jeffrey M. Friedman, M.D., Ph.D., is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and has won numerous awards, including the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, the 2010 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, the 2019 Wolf Prize in Medicine, the 2009 Shaw Prize and the 2005 Gairdner Award. A professor at The Rockefeller University and an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute studying the physiologic and genetic mechanisms that regulate food intake and body weight, he and his laboratory in 1994 isolated the mouse ob gene. They demonstrated that it encodes the hormone leptin, which reduces food intake in mice. His current research is aimed at understanding the neural and physiological mechanisms by which leptin transmits its weight-reducing signal.