Since 2014, Drs. Robert Farese and Tobias Walther have run a joint research lab in the TH Chan School of Public Health (HSPH) and Harvard Medical School at Harvard University. Their lab studies the mechanisms and physiology of lipid synthesis and storage in lipid droplets; organelles that are vital for storing energy and membrane building materials for the cell.
Farese is currently Chair and Professor of Molecular Metabolism at HSPH, Professor of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School, and an Associate Member of the Broad Institute. As an undergraduate student at the University of Florida, Farese studied chemistry. He went on to do an MD degree at Vanderbilt University. He completed his residency training at the University of Colorado and then moved to the University of California, San Francisco to train in endocrinology and metabolism. From 1994-2014, Farese was an investigator at the Gladstone Institutes at UCSF. In 2005, he took a sabbatical in the lab of Peter Walter at UCSF. There he met Tobi Walther, who was a post-doc at the time, and they began their long-running collaboration to study lipid droplets.
Farese has received numerous awards and honors for his pioneering research. He is an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the Association of American Physicians and he has received the Bristol-Myers Squibb Freedom to Discover Award and the ASBMB Avanti Award in Lipids. Learn more about research in the Farese and Walther Lab here.
