Horton receives Frontiers in Science Award

Dr. Jay Horton, Director of the Center for Human Nutrition as well as Professor of Internal Medicine and Molecular Genetics, has been awarded the Frontiers in Science Award from the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. The award was presented at the AACE 25th Annual Scientific & Clinical Congress, which was held in May.

The Frontiers in Science Award is presented for exemplary contributions in the researcher’s area of expertise, specifically work elucidating the mechanism by which the protein PCSK9 works. This work contributed to the development of PCSK9 antibodies to treat high cholesterol. This new class of drugs has proven to be stunningly effective at treating familial hypercholesterolemia

Dr. Horton’s lab has done much work on how fatty liver disease and obesity develop, and has made fundamental contributions to the understanding of lipogenesis, steatohepatitis, and cholesterol metabolism. A current focus of his laboratory is the way that transcriptional regulators of fat metabolism contribute to the development of fatty liver in various disease processes such as diabetes, obesity, and lipodystrophies.

Dr. Horton earned his bachelor’s and medical degrees from the University of Iowa, and did his internal medicine residency, gastroenterology fellowship, and Howard Hughes postdoctoral fellowship at UT Southwestern Medical Center.

Dr. Horton, who is also Chief of the Division of Digestive and Liver Diseases, holds the Distinguished Chair in Human Nutrition, the Center for Human Nutrition Director’s Endowed Chair, the Scott Grundy Director’s Chair, and The Dr. Robert C. and Veronica Atkins Chair in Obesity & Diabetes Research.

Yu to hold Serena Simmons Distinguished Chair

Dr. Hongtao Yu, Professor of Pharmacology, has been selected to hold The Serena S. Simmons Distinguished Chair in Cancer Immunopharmacology.

Dr. Yu, who came to UT Southwestern Medical Center in 1999 as the Michael L. Rosenberg Scholar in Biomedical Research, leads a laboratory that studies cellular mechanisms that govern chromosome inheritance and integrity using a combination of cell biological, biochemical, and biophysical methods. He became an Associate Professor with tenure in 2004 and was promoted to Professor in 2008, the same year that he was selected as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator at UT Southwestern.

He graduated from Peking University in Beijing, China, before earning his Ph.D. in chemistry in 1995 from Harvard University. His thesis research focused on the structure determination of protein modules involved in signal transduction. He then completed his postdoctoral training in biology at Harvard Medical School (1995-1999). During his postdoctoral training, Dr. Yu studied the regulation of the cell division cycle in vertebrates.