When he was walking among the graduate and medical students at Louisiana State University Medical School in the late 1970s, his classmates couldn’t have known that one of their own would earn his PhD in medical physiology (and later his postdoctoral training at IU Medical School in neuroendocrinology) and go on to author over 100 scientific papers, including his seminal work on the roles of leptin and ghrelin in regulating energy balance. But if they’ve been paying attention over the years, they know that, at an age when most of us are slowing down, Mark Heiman is still going strong and continuing to achieve impressive results in the process.

Heiman is a Fellow of the Obesity Society and a member of The Endocrine Society where he plays an advisory role in the Entrepreneurship special interest group. He has served on editorial boards for Endocrinology, Molecular Metabolism and the Journal of Hepatology & Gastroenterology, as well as on NIH study sections.

Although he professes to be retired, you may still see him walking the halls of the ICBI; he is the Chief Science Officer for Scioto Biosciences, an ICBI company since 2018. Heiman has a special interest in the gastrointestinal microbiome and its role in health and disease. We’ll learn more about that and his current research with Scioto Biosciences in Part II of the ICBI’s Researcher Spotlight. 

Stay tuned . . .