Steve O'Rahilly (pronounced O-RA-hill-EE), Director of the MRC Metabolic Diseases Unit and a member of the Crick Science Advisory Board, studied medicine at University College Dublin. After research into Type 2 diabetes and insulin resistance at the University of Oxford and Harvard Medical School, he joined the University of Cambridge, where he is now a professor of Clinical Biochemistry and Medicine, Director of the MRC Metabolic Diseases Unit, co-director of the Institute of Metabolic Science, and the scientific Director of the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre.
Steve is an endocrinologist who has transformed our understanding of the control of human energy balance and metabolism and how these can be disturbed to cause severe obesity and/or subtypes of diabetes. He studies patients with extreme and inherited metabolic conditions and was the first to establish that some very obese children have a mutation in the gene for leptin — an appetite-controlling hormone. His work has led to a better understanding of how the brain senses its state of nutrition and controls not only appetite but growth, the rate of pubertal development and the accrual of muscle mass, and has revealed a genetic basis for more than 20 human disorders, some of which are amenable to targeted treatments.
The lab's current activities are in three broad areas: disorders of appetite/eating including obesity; metabolic and endocrine phenotypes; and the control of body composition, lean mass and amino acid metabolism and its disturbance in diseases such as cachexia. The group takes a multidisciplinary approach to all these problems ranging from fundamental research in cells and murine models through to human genetic studies, recall-by-genotype human physiological studies and clinical trials in selected areas including Hyperemesis Gravidarum.
Steve is a fellow of the Royal Society and the Academy of Medical Sciences, and has won numerous awards including the Banting Medal of the American Diabetes Society and the Croonian Medal (twice). He was knighted in 2013 for services to medical research.
