Mitchell Lazar, the Willard and Rhoda Ware Professor in Diabetes and Metabolic Diseases in the department of medicine at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine and founding director of the Penn Institute for Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism (IDOM), will receive the 2019 Rolf Luft Award from the Karolinska Institute. This global distinction recognizes Dr. Lazar’s outstanding scientific contribution in endocrinology and diabetes. Dr. Lazar will present the Luft Prize Lecture, entitled, “Nuclear Receptors, Circadian Rhythms, and Metabolism,” on May 8 at the Nobel Forum in Stockholm, Sweden.

Dr. Lazar is receiving the award for his groundbreaking work in transcriptional regulation of metabolism, including discoveries that revealed how the environment interacts with the genome to regulate circadian rhythms and metabolism and how these mechanisms impact obesity and diabetes.

His research, focused mostly on gene and metabolic regulation and mechanisms of hormone action, has led to discoveries that span molecular biology, physiology, endocrinology and metabolism. Dr. Lazar’s work has led to discoveries of the hormone resistin, which plays an integral role in insulin resistance, and the role of the nuclear receptor PPARg in the development and function of fat cells, including its link to insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. He also discovered the circadian nuclear receptor Rev-erba and identified mechanisms by which it represses gene transcription as a core circadian clock component and controller of metabolic rhythms.