Featuring Dr. Aaron Cypess
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Show Notes
In this conversation, Dr. Aaron Cypess discusses his research on brown adipose tissue (BAT), an organ that burns fat to generate heat. Initially thought to be present only in small mammals and young children, functional BAT was discovered in adult humans in 2009, spurring global research into its potential for treating obesity and metabolic diseases. Dr. Cypess explains the differences between BAT and white adipose tissue (WAT), and how BAT communicates with other tissues through hormones. Dr. Cypess then focuses on BAT's role in diabetes and obesity, highlighting the collaborative environment that supports his research.
Guest:
Aaron M. Cypess, MD, PhD, MMSc
Senior Investigator and Chief, Translational Physiology Section, DEOB, NIDDK, NIH
Dr. Aaron Cypess is a senior investigator at the National Institutes of Health, where his research group uses a combination of clinical trials and basic science to help understand how brown fat works at the levels of the cells and then to translate the information into practical ways to treat people with obesity, diabetes, and other chronic illnesses. Previously, Dr. Cypess was an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, where he investigated the pathogenesis of metabolic diseases. He received his MD from the Joan & Sanford I. Weill Medical College of Cornell University and his MMSc from Harvard Medical School. Dr. Cypess earned his PhD from Rockefeller University where he studied Signal Transduction by the Glucagon Receptor.
Host:
David Yarmosh, MS
Lead Bioinformatician, ATCC
David Yarmosh is a lead bioinformatician in ATCC’s Sequencing and Bioinformatics Center. He’s a graduate of New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering. He has been working in large data aggregation and analysis since 2013 and microbial genomics with a focus on biosurveillance R&D efforts since 2016. David has led international training exercises in Peru and Senegal, sharing metagenomic analytical capabilities. His interests include genomics database construction, metadata collection, drug resistance mechanisms, bioinformatics standards, and machine learning. Since joining ATCC in 2020, David has worked extensively in SARS-CoV-2 classification, epidemiology, and genomics evaluation, including enhanced and uniform variant reporting. He has contributed more broadly to genomics reporting and analytical standardization and he has helped develop the podcast Behind the Biology, which he now hosts.
