The Emont Lab at UChicago: Fat’s exciting!

You might think of fat as just something to get rid of, but it actually is very important in regulating whole body metabolism. Fat is needed to store fuel for your body, and too much or too little of it can start to cause problems. There are a lot of unanswered questions about the relationship between fat and disease, for example, what specifically about excess fat is leading to the development of disease? Why does excess fat in some parts of the body correlate more with disease risk than fat from other parts of the body? These questions and more drive our research to try to understand adipocyte (fat cell) biology- how these cells develop and how they change during health and disease.