2019 Katarina T. Borer Lectureship
The School of Kinesiology is pleased to announce Dr. Laurie Goodyear as the speaker for the 2019 Katarina T. Borer Lecturership in Exercise Endocrinology and Metabolism. This annual lectureship is made possible through a gift from Movement Science Professor Emerita Katarina Borer and her husband Dr. Paul Wenger.
Dr. Goodyear will present on the topic “Why Moms and Dads Should Exercise: Molecular Discoveries of the Beneficial Effects of Parental Exercise on Offspring Health.”
“It is a great honor to be asked to give this lecture,” Dr. Goodyear said.
Approximately 346 million people worldwide have diabetes, according to the World Health Organization - and without intervention, that number could double by 2050. Recent studies have established risk patterns for both obesity and type 2 diabetes developing as a consequence of alternations in growth and metabolism during critical windows of prenatal development. The ongoing increases in obesity, prediabetes, and diabetes in women of reproductive age may trigger a vicious cycle of risk and disease to future generations.
Dr. Goodyear recently used mouse models to show that maternal exercise improves the metabolic health of offspring as they age, including improvement in glucose tolerance, insulin sensitivity, body weight, and body composition.
“Exercise is extremely important for overall health, and we hypothesized that maternal exercise would be important for the health of the offspring,” she said. “Understanding the role that maternal exercise can have could be important to help diminish the cycle of obesity that is being spread from human mothers to offspring.”
Her talk will reveal mechanisms by which maternal exercise transmits these beneficial effects to offspring metabolism. These findings could have significant clinical implications, leading to novel treatments aimed at preventing transmission of diabetes risk to offspring.
Dr. Goodyear is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, as well as the section head of the Joslin Diabetes Center. She is the leader in the field of cellular signaling in skeletal muscle, including groundbreaking work on AMPK (an AMP-activated protein kinase enzyme that plays a role in cellular energy homeostasis that activates glucose and fatty acid uptake and oxidation when cellular energy is low) and the elucidation of numerous contraction-stimulated signaling networks. She has served on numerous national and international committees and panels for grant and editorial review and trained over 100 post-doctoral fellows and students, many of whom hold key professional academic positions in the US and abroad.
Dr. Goodyear has received several awards, including Career Development Awards from the American Diabetes Association and Juvenile Diabetes Foundation; a New Investigator Award from the American College of Sports Medicine; and the 2012 Edward F. Adolph Distinguished Lectureship of the American Physiological Society. She has published more than 175 papers and has the honor of giving over 100 invited lectures at national and international conferences.
The talk will talk place on Friday, October 18, at 2:30 pm at the Oliphant-Marshall Auditorium in Brehm Tower (1000 Wall St., Ann Arbor). A reception will follow.
To RSVP, please visit myumi.ch/errk2.