Dr. Gary Schwartz is Principal Investigator of the Skirball Institute for Nutrient Sensing, the Director of Biomedical Cores for the Diabetes Center, and a Core Director of Animal Energy Balance Phenotyping Core of the New York Obesity Research Center. Dr. Schwartz’s work focuses on nutrient sensing in the control of energy balance.
Dr. Schwartz’s current and future research efforts focus on the following:
- Dr. Schwartz has demonstrated that gut-brain sensory signaling is critical to help control nutrient availability by limiting food intake during a meal and by reducing hepatic glucose production via a gut-brain-liver circuit (Nature, 2008). In addition, he has developed neuroaoanatomical and neurochemical approaches revealing that central nervous system hypothalamic sites sense nutrients and adiposity hormones. This central nutrient sensing activates multiple neural pathways that regulate nutrient availability by limiting food intake, altering the neural outflow to adipose tissue, increasing thermogenesis and energy expenditure, and modulating hepatic glucose production and lipoprotein secretion (Cell Metabolism, 2005; Nature, 2007).
- As aging is accompanied by a profile of increased metabolic challenges, such as altered food intake and adiposity, increased leptin and insulin resistance, and neural degeneration, another avenue of investigation involves how aging mediated changes in central nervous system structure and function affect nutrient sensing in the control of energy homeostasis.