Johan Auwerx (born 1958 in Diepenbeek, Belgium) is a Belgian biologist, and a professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). His research in the fields of metabolism has contributed to a better understanding of the regulation of Mitochondrion function by signaling pathways.
Career
Johan Auwerx studied medicine at the Université catholique de Louvain and received his doctoral degree in 1982. He then worked as a
post-doctoral researcher at the University of Washington in
Seattle, and was appointed professor at the Louis Pasteur University in
Strasbourg, and at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne in 2008.
[ Johan Auwerx biography on EPFL's website] He leads the Laboratory of Integrative Systems Physiology (LISP) and occupies the Nestlé chair on energy metabolism.
Johan Auwerx's lab studies how factors such as diet, physical exercise or hormones regulate metabolism by altering gene expression through modulating the activity of transcription factors and co-factors.
Distinctions
Johan Auwerx was elected as an EMBO member in 2003.
In 2016, he was awarded the Marcel Benoist Prize
for his work on
mitochondria and their role in
metabolism, and more specifically on how
Nutrient can influence cellular behavior, thereby initiating fat cell breakdown or preventing metabolic disorders. Johan Auwerx was awarded several other prizes, such as the
Danone International prize for nutrition (2008), the
Minkowski Prize (1998) and the Morgagni Gold Medal.
He is on the editorial board of journals such as
Science,
Cell Metabolism,
The EMBO Journal and
The Journal of Cell Biology.
As of 2020, his publications have been cited more than 100,000 times and his
h-index is 166. He is therefore a highly cited researcher, according to the Institute for Scientific Information.
