Bartolome Burguera MD, PhD

Bartolome Burguera M.D, Ph.D. is Chairman of Endocrinology and Metabolism Institute (EMI). He joined the Cleveland Clinic as staff physician and Director of Obesity programs in the Department of Endocrinology Metabolic Institute and the Bariatric Institute, on September of 2013. He is also Professor of Medicine in the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine and has a joint appointment in the department of Cellular & Molecular Medicine.

He also serves as Executive Medical Director of the National Diabetes and Obesity Research Institute in Biloxi, Mississippi. A scientific and educational collaboration between the state of Mississippi, prominent medical and academic Mississippian institutions and the Cleveland clinic. His clinical and academic interests are focused on the field of obesity, particularly the role of bariatric medicine and non-surgical weight-loss interventions to treat obesity and diabetes. He has also studied the prevention of childhood obesity. He has been very instrumental setting up a large interdisciplinary shared medical appointment obesity therapeutic program, which is being offered face-to-face as well as through virtual visits.

Dr. Burguera was at the forefront of research around medical treatment for obesity and the role of leptin in the regulation of appetite in the early 1990s. He collaborated in major international obesity prevention and therapy initiatives and helped develop obesity programs at various institutions, working as a fellow at Mayo Clinic, and as a staff consultant at Boston University, University of Pittsburgh and Son Dureta University Hospital in Spain. He had the opportunity of working at East Carolina University when the bypass surgery was being developed, as a potential treatment for obesity and diabetes.

He was also responsible for setting up the clinical trial TRAMOMTANA which demonstrated the positive role of an intensive life style intervention and medications, as medical therapy of patients with severe obesity who are non-surgical candidates. He is also interested in obesity prevention in children. He was responsible for a program named ACTYBOSS, an Obesity prevention clinical trial, incentive-driven, after-school intervention program which involved free supervised exercise sessions and nutritional lectures.