Morris Birnbaum, MD, PhD, is Senior Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer of Internal Medicine, comprising Cardiovascular and Metabolic Disease as well as Neuroscience research. Specifically in Cardiovascular and Metabolic Disease, Dr. Birnbaum guides the discovery of novel transformative therapies to reduce the prevalence of cardiometabolic dysfunction, thereby eliminating or diminishing the impact of heart diseases on life expectancy and quality. He is responsible for setting the portfolio and technology strategies to bring programs from initial discovery through to proof of concept in the clinic. Dr. Birnbaum completed his undergraduate, graduate, and medical training at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island before moving to St. Louis to carry out clinical training in Internal Medicine at Barnes Hospital of Washington University School of Medicine. He then performed postdoctoral studies at the University of California, San Francisco and Sloan-Kettering Cancer Institute. Following an associate professorship in the Department of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School, he moved to the University of Pennsylvania as Professor of Medicine and Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, where he later became Associate Dean for Biomedical Cores and Associate Director of the Institute for Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism. Dr. Birnbaum was elected to membership in the American Society for Clinical Investigation and Association of American Physicians, and is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has served as Deputy Editor for the Journal of Clinical Investigation and is currently on the Editorial board of Cell Metabolism. His research involves the study of insulin action, metabolism and how organisms respond to both a deficit and a surfeit of food.

 insulin action, metabolism