Dr Sadaf Farooqi PhD, FRCP

Biography

Dr Farooqi qualified with Honours in Medicine from the University of Birmingham, being awarded the gold medal. After hospital posts in Birmingham and Oxford she moved to Cambridge to undertake a PhD. She identified the first single gene defect to cause human obesity in patients with a mutation in the leptin gene, published in Nature in 1997 and described their dramatic response to leptin therapy, establishing leptin’s role in the regulation of eating behaviour, puberty and immune function (NEJM 1999; SCIENCE 2007). As a Wellcome Trust Senior Clinical Fellow at the Institute of Metabolic Science in Cambridge, Dr Farooqi co-ordinates a programme of research into the genetic, molecular and physiological basis of human obesity. She has been invited to speak at numerous international meetings, is on several Editorial Boards andhas been the recipient of a number of awards for her work including the RD Lawrence Award, Diabetes UK 2007, Andre Mayer Award, International Association for the Study of Obesity 2006.