Luigi Fontana, MD: Med Students Should be Taught Nutrition in Medical School
Updated October 12, 2015
Dr. Luigi Fontana was a recent guest speaker at the McDougall Advanced Study Weekend in Santa Rosa, CA.
Dr. Fontana is an internationally recognized physician scientist and one of the world’s leaders in the field of nutrition and healthy longevity in humans. His pioneering studies on the effects of dietary restriction in humans have opened a new area of nutrition-related research that holds tremendous promise for the prevention of age-related chronic diseases and for the understanding of the biology of human aging. Fontana’s work defines integrative human biology, and has helped direct how different aging phenotypes can and should be applied to various human populations based on both molecular and physiological parameters. As such, his work has the most profound importance as strategies are formulated and tested for improving healthspan in humans.
He is a Full Professor of Medicine and Nutritional Sciences at Brescia (Italy) and Washington University in St.Louis (USA) Schools of Medicine, and co-directs the Longevity Research Program at WUSTL. Dr. Fontana has published over 80 manuscripts in prestigious journals including Science, Nature, Cell, New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, Circulation, Journal of the American College of Cardiology, Diabetes and PNAS. He has been invited to present his work at international conferences and top medical schools and research institutes around the world, including Harvard, Cambridge, Yale, Universitè Paris “Pierre et Marie Curie”, Max Plank Institute of Aging, Sydney, among others. Dr. Fontana’s is the recipient of two prestigious awards: the 2009 American Federation Aging Research (AFAR) Breakthroughs in Gerontology Award and the 2011 Glenn Award for Research in Biological Mechanisms of Aging. He is a Scientific Member of the Board of Directors of the American Aging Association.