Elisabetta Mueller PhD

Elisabetta Mueller, PhD, associate professor of medicine, joined NYU Langone in 2016, after spending 12 years at the National Institutes of Health studying adipose tissue biology and the role fat cells play in obesity, aging, and metabolic disease. It is widely understood that white fat stores energy and brown fat burns it, but the discovery of beige fat—a newly identified adipocyte that develops in white adipose tissue but expresses characteristics of brown—has opened the door to new therapeutic possibilities, such as inducing the “browning” of white fat.

To that end, Dr. Mueller and her team are focusing on the cascade of molecular events that determine whether fat-cell precursors become white, brown, or beige adipocytes and which transcription factors, the proteins that control gene expression, act as molecular switches for energy storage or expenditure.

Recently, Dr. Mueller and her team identified and validated in vitro and in vivo two such switches, transcription regulators HSF1 and ZNF638, and demonstrated that pharmacological activation of HSF1 in mice can protect them from the development of obesity and metabolic disease. The researchers are now testing these factors genetically in animal models to see if they can reprogram fat cells to be energy burners instead of energy hoarders.