2025 Preliminary Program

Start of scientific program: Monday, July 28 at 15:45
End of scientific program: Friday, August 1 at 16:30, closing banquet & awards ceremony to follow (19:00-23:00)
Sessions will run from approximately 9:00 - 17:00 daily.

2025 MARS Speakers

	Sadaf Farooqi University of Cambridge, UK Professor Sadaf Farooqi PhD, FRCP, FMedSci, FRS is a Wellcome Principal Research Fellow and Professor of Metabolism and Medicine at the University of Cambridge, UK. She is an internationally leading Clinician Scientist who has made seminal contributions to understanding the genetic and physiological mechanisms that underlie obesity and its complications. The work of Sadaf Farooqi and her colleagues has fundamentally altered the understanding of how body weight is regulated. With colleagues, she discovered and characterised the first genetic disorders that cause severe childhood obesity and established that the principal driver of obesity in these conditions was a failure of the control of appetite. Her work is often cited as an exemplar of how the translation of research into the mechanisms of disease can lead to patient benefit. She has received a number of awards including the 2024 Outstanding Clinical Investigator Award from the Endocrine Society. In 2021, she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in recognition of her exceptional contribution to science.
	John I. Glendinning Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Biology, Barnard College, Columbia University Departments of Biology and Neuroscience & Behavior John Glendinning received his PhD in Zoology from the University of Florida, studying the chemical ecology of wild mice. He conducted postdoctoral research at Florida State University Lloyd Beidler and James Smith, and at the University of Arizona with Elizabeth Bernays. John started his own lab in 1996 at Barnard College. His research seeks to understand the physiological underpinnings of life's great pleasures: eating. His current work focuses on three questions. How do the oral and postoral actions of foods interact to determine daily food intake? How do the oral sensory features of food trigger anticipatory physiological responses such as cephalic-phase insulin release? And finally, how did humans overcome the challenges of nourishing themselves prior to the advent of the modern food system?
	Marion M Hetherington University of Leeds and Penn State University Professor Marion M Hetherington, is Professor Emerita in Biopsychology, University of Leeds and Affiliate Professor in Nutritional Sciences at Penn State University. Her research takes a lifespan approach to determinants of appetite and food from infancy to old age. Professor Hetherington obtained her BSc (Hons) first class at the University of Glasgow, then trained as a Primary School teacher before undertaking a DPhil at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Dr Barbara Rolls. She held a Fulbright Scholarship at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and then a Fogarty International Fellowship at the National Institute of Mental Health. She returned to the UK to take up a lectureship at the University of Dundee in 1990 and was appointed Professor of Biopsychology at the University of Liverpool in 2001. She held the Thomas Ward Endowed Chair in Psychology, University of Leeds until her retirement in 2021. She is Editor in Chief of the journal Appetite, sits on the UK Government's Subgroup on Maternal and Child Nutrition (SMCN), and is a trustee of Give A Child A Hope in partnership with Revival Centre, Matugga, Uganda.
	Daniel Nettle Institut Jean Nicod, CNRS, Paris, France Daniel Nettle is a CNRS senior research scientist at the Institut Jean Nicod, Paris, and a Professor of Community Wellbeing at Northumbria University, Newcastle, UK.

2025 Symposia Speakers

Presidential symposium

John Cryan
Carlos Ribeiro
Kimberly R. Smith
Suzanne Higgs

Exercise as a modifier of feeding

David Thivel
Barbara Lieder
Kevin Williams

GLP-1R agonists: what can we learn from these drugs?

Ralph DiLeone
Jessica Matheus Sa
Mette Kruse Klausen

“It’s all in the blend”: effects of combining macronutrients on food intake and reward

Annika Flynn
Tera Fazzino
John Hayes

What "food systems" can teach us about drug use and addiction

Sue Grigson
Brandon Henderson
Katherine Serafine

The competition is on! Balancing ingestive and competing behaviors
Celebrating the 75th Anniversary of NIDDK

Michael Krashes
Tatiana Kortokova
Celine Riera