Dr. Jonathan Xia: Endocrine Society Medical Student Achievement Award

By Ron Durham

Dr. Jonathan Xia
Dr. Jonathan Xia

Given the rising obesity epidemic in the United States, it’s difficult to imagine a more needed area of biomedical investigation than that of obesity/metabolism. Dr. Jonathan Xia would no doubt agree, as that has been his primary research focus throughout his career.

Dr. Xia majored in neuroscience at Washington University in St. Louis, where he graduated with honors in 2010 and worked in the laboratory of Dr. Jeffrey Gordon, Director of the Center for Genome Sciences and Systems Biology there. While working on his doctorate at UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dr. Xia joined the lab of Dr. Philipp Scherer and continued researching obesity and metabolic syndrome.

For his considerable efforts in the field, Dr. Xia has been named the recipient of the 2017 Endocrine Society Medical Student Achievement Award, an honor given to a medical student who has done significant research in endocrinology.

“As with many of our M.D./Ph.D. students, Jonathan joined the group well versed in laboratory work,” said Dr. Scherer, Director of the Touchstone Center for Diabetes Research and Professor of Internal Medicine and of Cell Biology. “He thrived during the Ph.D. portion of his degree and generated an impressive body of work that moved the field of adiponectin physiology and lipotoxicity significantly forward.

“He is a steady worker who combined a deep understanding of the physiological problem at hand with targeted, well-controlled, and well-executed experiments. He will be an asset for any field in biomedical research that will attract his interest.”

Dr. Xia will soon begin his internal medicine residency at Northwestern University in Chicago, where he will be part of its Physician Scientist Training Program.

“What I like about the field of obesity/metabolism research is that this is a complicated issue that the medical community will be facing soon,” Dr. Xia said. “It will require cooperation from scientists, clinicians, and public health experts to solve this issue in the future.”

Dr. Xia said he first became interested in the topics of metabolism, obesity, and Type 2 diabetes while working in Dr. Gordon’s lab. At UT Southwestern, that research continued in his thesis work as he investigated the function of ceramides, a type of signaling lipid, and their role in the development of hepatic insulin resistance and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. His findings were published in two peer-reviewed manuscripts in Cell Metabolism and Molecular Metabolism, where he was first author.

In addition, Dr. Xia was selected to receive the Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award by the National Institutes of Health on his first submission, which provides four years of research funding. Dr. Xia has given oral presentations at two Keystone Symposiums and was awarded the Keystone Symposia Future of Science Scholarship in 2015, a grant awarded to outstanding young investigators at the conference.

Dr. Xia is grateful to Dr. Scherer for his mentorship at UT Southwestern, describing him as “one of the greatest scientific influences I could ever have.” Other mentors who have supported him include Drs. Jay Horton, Director of the Center for Human Nutrition, and Professor of Internal Medicine and of Molecular Genetics; Perry Bickel, Chief of Endocrinology; and William Holland and Rana Gupta, both Assistant Professors of Internal Medicine.

Dr. Xia grew up in Edmond, Oklahoma. He has a younger sister who is a high school junior. His parents live in Oklahoma City.

While at UT Southwestern, Dr. Xia has volunteered for the STARS (Science Teacher Access to Resources at Southwestern) organization on campus, which serves to improve the quality of science education in high schools and middle schools in North Texas. He also has been active in Medical Scientist Training Program leadership positions. Since 2012, he has represented the program at the annual UT Austin Undergraduate Research Forum, and he was the lead organizer of the annual retreat of the MSTP program from 2013-2015.

“I want to work in academic medicine and have that balance of doing great research while also caring for patients,” Dr. Xia said. 

Dr. Xia spends his leisure time tasting and brewing craft beer, and he has organized weekly tastings for the past three years. He also enjoys cycling and cooking.

Dr. Bickel holds the Daniel W. Foster, M.D. Distinguished Chair in Internal Medicine.

Dr. Horton holds the Distinguished Chair in Human Nutrition, The Dr. Robert C. and Veronica Atkins Chair in Obesity & Diabetes Research, the Center for Human Nutrition Director’s Endowed Chair, and the Scott Grundy Director’s Chair.

Dr. Scherer holds the Gifford O. Touchstone, Jr. and Randolph G. Touchstone
Distinguished Chair in Diabetes Research.