Max Planck Institute for Metabolism Research, Cologne, Germany

Research

Jens Brüning made groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of how the brain regulates energy metabolism. He uncovered important and surprising roles of insulin signalling. He revealed how special groups of neurons of the hypothalamus in the brain respond to insulin: They regulate feeding behaviour, energy expenditure, and the distribution of nutrients to different organs according to glucose levels in the blood and the amount of fat stored in the body. More recently, his group unraveled that these hypothalamic cells are already regulated by the sensory perception of food, i.e. the smell of food, even before calories enter the body, and that this regulation rapidly modulates endoplasmic reticulum (ER) and mitochondrial functions in liver to metabolic adaptations for the changes to occur when food is consumed.

Academic Career

Jens Brüning received his MD from the University of Cologne, Germany, in 1993. He then moved to Harvard Medical School in Boston, USA, as a postdoc, and returned to Cologne in 1997 for his residency and to set up his own research group. He became tenured professor at the University of Cologne in 2003. He was appointed director of the MPI for Metabolism Research and director of the Polyclinic for Endocrinology, Diabetes, and Preventive Medicine at the University Hospital of Cologne in 2011. His work was awarded by the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of DFG, the Ernst Jung Prize for Medicine, the Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker Prize, the Heinrich Wieland Prize, and the Ernst Schering Prize. He is an elected member of EMBO and the National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.