I have had continuous research funding from the NIH and other sponsors as a principal investigator since 1991. My career has been devoted to clinical research involving exercise, nutrition, hormone, and pharmacologic interventions focused on various aspects of metabolism, including body weight regulation and fat distribution. I have been the Director of Research for the Division of Geriatric Medicine since 1999. I am currently the PI for NIH U54 and U01 awards and a VA Merit Review and have more than 280 original and solicited research publications. I hold several administrative positions including: Director of the Energy Balance Assessment Core in the Colorado Nutrition and Obesity Research Center (NORC); Senior Associate Director of the Colorado Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (CCTSI), and Associate Director of the Ludeman Center for Women’s Health Research (CWHR).
My research interests in the effects of sex hormones on body weight regulation and fat distribution began fortuitously early in my career. I conducted an intervention trial to evaluate the effects of exercise training and estrogen-based hormone therapy on bone mineral density in postmenopausal women. The supervised exercise intervention stopped after 11 months but the drug intervention continued for an additional 6 months. The fortuitous finding was that hormone therapy attenuated fat regain after the exercise intervention, particularly in the abdominal region. Two other intervention trials published around the same time also found that estrogens appeared to be a key regulator of abdominal fat accumulation in women, which catalyzed my interests in the metabolic actions of estrogens. Since 2012 I have served as the PI/PD for our Specialized Center of Research Excellence (SCORE) on Sex Differences (U54 AG062319), focused on Bioenergetic and Cardiometabolic Consequences of the Loss of Gonadal Function. The SCORE includes mechanistically driven basic, preclinical, and clinical studies, led by Drs. Dwight Klemm, Paul MacLean, and Kerrie Moreau (all NORC members), to understand how estradiol (and other factors) regulate the proliferation and function of adipocytes in the abdominal region. The Colorado NORC provides critical support for all of the SCORE projects, which is only one example of the tremendous value the NORC brings to the research enterprise at CU-AMC.