Speaker(s): Jacqueline M. Stephens, PhD
Date: December 14, 2020
Time: 3:30 pm
School of Biological Sciences welcomes Dr. Jacqueline Stevens, Professor and Claude B. Pennington, Jr. Endowed Chair in Biomedical Research, Pennington Biomedical Research Center. She will talk about her career path to becoming the director of the Adipocyte Biology lab at Pennington Biomedical. She will also talk about different types of students and staff that make up her laboratory. She will also talk briefly about two of her current NIH Funded research projects. She will talk about STAT5, a transcription factor involved in adipose tissue development and she will talk about botanicals that being investigated for the treatment of metabolic diseases.
Dr. Jacqueline M. Stephens earned a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from East Carolina University School of Medicine. In graduate school, she became interested in fat cell biology and the role of these cells in the pathogenesis of obesity and Type 2 diabetes (T2DM). She pursued post-doctoral training at Boston University School of Medicine. In 1996, she moved to LSU to set up her own laboratory. She has had sustained funding from the NIH to study molecular aspects of obesity and Type 2 Diabetes. She has served on the Editorial Boards of several journals, including Obesity, Diabetes, JBC, AJP-Endo and Metabolism, and Adipocytes. She has also served or chaired numerous NIH grant review panels as well as reviewing grants for the UK, Netherlands, Germany, France, and Canada. In 2011, she moved her research laboratory to Pennington Biomedical. Dr. Stephens teaches Endocrinology at LSU and has a very active research lab of undergraduates and Ph.D. students from LSU as well as several post-doctoral fellows. Dr. Stephens co-directs the Pennington Botanical Research Center that studies the anti-diabetic properties of plant extracts. Dr. Stephens is also the director of the Metabolic Basis of Disease Center at Pennington, that was established in 2020.