Ruth Loos is the Charles Bronfman Professor in Personalized Medicine and Director of the Genetics of Obesity and Related Metabolic Traits Program at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
Her research focuses on the etiology of obesity, in particular, on the identification of genes and genetic loci contributing to the risk of obesity and related traits. By identifying genes, she aims to gain insight into the biology that underlies body weight regulation and the mechanisms that link adiposity to its comorbidities. She has been involved in gene-discovery since 2005. With the GIANT (Genetic Investigation of ANTropometric traits) consortium, she has contributed to the majority of large-scale gene-discovery efforts that thus far have revealed more than 500 obesity-associated loci. Furthermore, she studies more refined adiposity phenotypes and biomarkers to target the deeper layers that define “obesity” and to fully capture all aspects of the biology involved.
Besides gene-discovery, Ruth uses epidemiological methods to assess the public health implications of the established loci by examining their predictive value, interaction with lifestyle factors, and their role in precision medicine of common obesity.
