Laurie Goodyear

Dr. Laurie J. Goodyear is a Senior Investigator at the Joslin Diabetes Center and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. The long-standing goal of her laboratory is to elucidate the molecular basis for the benefits of exercise on health. Regular physical activity can have a plethora of beneficial effects including improved glycemic control, improved lipid profiles, and reduced rates of cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s disease and other complications. The importance of exercise therefore cannot be understated, especially in people with obesity and type 2 diabetes. Her group has been at the forefront of basic and translational research aimed at determining mechanisms for many of these important effects of exercise, publishing approximately 200 primary papers and reviews investigating cell systems, rodent models and human subjects. She has trained a combined total of more than 100 post-doctoral fellows, junior faculty, graduate and undergraduate students during her career. Her lab has extensive experience in exercise physiology, muscle and adipose tissue physiology, intracellular signaling mechanisms and in vivo metabolism. The major focus areas of her lab’s current work includes the investigation of adipose tissue and muscle as critical mediators of exercise training-induced improvements in glucose tolerance and metabolism, mechanisms for the beneficial effects of maternal and paternal exercise on offspring metabolic health, and the identification of novel exercise-induced circulating factors that stimulate tissue-to-tissue communication to improve tissue and metabolic function. These areas of investigation have the potential to provide novel therapeutic targets and have major ramifications for human health, especially given the alarming increases in obesity, diabetes and related chronic diseases.