Prof. Ruth Loos Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, USA

Dr. Ruth Loos is Director of the Genetics of Obesity and Related Metabolic Traits Program, in The Charles Bronfman Institute of Personalized Medicine of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
Her primary research interests focuses on the identification of genes and genetic loci contributing to the risk... read moreof obesity and related metabolic traits. She has been involved in gene-discovery since 2005, when ‘genome-wide association’ was introduced and has since actively contributed to many consortia that use this approach to identify genetic loci for a large number of metabolic traits. Increasingly, her gene-discovery work also focuses on the identification of low-frequency variants through the implementation exome-chip genotyping and sequencing projects, not only in individuals of white European descent, but also in those of African and Hispanic decent.
Besides gene-discovery, Ruth uses epidemiological methods to follow-up on established loci with the aim to elucidate the pathways through which they increase risk of metabolic disease. Furthermore, her work also assesses the public health implications of the established loci by examining their predictive value and their interaction with lifestyle factors such as diet and physical activity.