Grill Lab

Laboratory of Regulatory Systems Neuroscience

University of Pennsylvania

   The dramatic increase in the prevalence of obese and overweight individuals has intensified interest in obesity as a major health problem (type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease are prominent among the co-morbidities of obesity). Feeding-related pathologies are not limited to those associated with excess food consumption, but also include pathologies of insufficient food consumption such as failure to thrive, food selectivity, early satiety and dyspepsia. What is remarkable is that despite the increased prevalence of these pathologies of feeding for humans of all ages, there are no effective pharmacological treatments currently available. It is clear that the development of new and effective pharmacotherapies relies on findings from basic research on the neurobiology of energy balance.  Our lab is focused on expanding knowledge on the neural circuits and neurochemical systems that control food intake and energy expenditure.  Unique to our approach is the perspective that the neural control of energy balance is anatomically distributed rather than centered in any one region of the brain. This perspective leads us to examine the neural processing of peripherally generated neural signals (e.g., vagal afferents) and blood-born correlates of energy status signals at multiple brain nuclei including those within caudal brainstem and hypothalamus.

Lab News:

»Shiru Zhao is a visiting graduate student from Xi'an Jiaotong University in China.  She is participating in a graduate fellowship to work in Dr. Grill's lab for 2 years.

»Scott Kanoski and Andrea Spaeth have arrived in our the lab this past summer.  Scott comes to us from Purdue University, where he earned his doctoral degree.  Andrea is our new Psychology graduate student coming from William & Mary where she completed her masters degree in Psychology.

»Karolina Skibicka presented her doctoral dissertation entitled: "Energy Balance Effects of Central Melanocortin and Leptin: Moving Outside of the Hypothalamic Box" on June 29, 2009.

»Matt Hayes, PhD, won the 2008 Ethan Sims Young Investigator Award from The Obesity Society for his talk entitled "Endogenous Hindbrain GLP-1R Activation Contributes to the Control of Food Intake by Mediating Gastric Satiation Signaling"

»Karolina Skibicka won the Pat Simons 2008 Travel Award from The Obesity Society for her talk entitled "Energy Balance Effects of Parabrachial Nucleus Melanocortin and Leptin Receptor Stimulation"

From Endocrine News, May 2007:

From Endocrine News, February 2006:

Site last updated by Theresa Leichner on 10/08/09