Image Credit: Kintija Eigmina-Chemali
Dr. Hei Sook Sul gave the 41st Shorb Lecture on Nutrition on November 18. The lecture series in honor of Dr. Mary Shorb is sponsored jointly by the Department of Animal and Avian Sciences and Department of Nutrition and Food Science.
This year’s speaker, Professor Hei Sook Sul, is the Doris H. Calloway Chair in Human Nutrition in the Department of Nutritional Sciences and Toxicology at the University of California, Berkeley. She joined the faculty at the Harvard School of Public Health in 1985 as an Assistant Professor, was promoted to Associate Professor, and moved to her current position at Berkeley in 1994. Her research interest is in adipocyte development, lipid metabolism, obesity and diabetes. She has published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers in prestigious journals. She has been awarded the American Society of Nutrition, Osborne and Mendel Award in 2006. For the Shorb lecture, Dr. Sul spoke about her research in lipid metabolism, fat cell differentiation, and how her research relates to obesity and diabetes. Her talk was entitled: "Transcriptional Regulation of Lipogenesis."
Dr. Mary Shorb was a Professor of Nutrition at the University of Maryland, College Park in the College of Agriculture (1949-1972). She developed an assay for an essential growth factor that laid the foundation for the discovery, purification and identification of Vitamin B12 by researchers at Merck.
The Shorb Lectureship was made possible by an endowment from Merck to honor and perpetuate her legacy through the annual Mary Shorb Lectureship in Nutrition. Among the many honors and accolades, Dr. Shorb received the prestigious Mead-Johnson Award in Nutrition. Every year, a scientist of sterling credentials is invited to give a ‘public lecture’ on campus focused on the broad area of nutrition. The guest also spends the day meeting with graduate students and faculty with interests in nutrition.
