Professor Sadaf Farooqi

Sadaf Farooqi is a Wellcome Principal Research Fellow and Professor of Metabolism and Medicine at the University of Cambridge, UK. She is an internationally recognized Clinician Scientist who has made seminal contributions to understanding the genetic and physiological mechanisms that underlie severe obesity and its complications. The work of Sadaf Farooqi and her colleagues has fundamentally altered the understanding of human body weight regulation and obesity. 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 central control of appetite. Her work is often cited as an exemplar of how the translation of research into the basic mechanisms of disease can lead to patient benefit.