Evan Rosen is an institute member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, a principal investigator at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and a professor at Harvard Medical School.
Rosen specializes in understanding the transcriptional pathways that underlie metabolic diseases like obesity and Type 2 diabetes. In particular, he has a longstanding interest in using genomic and epigenomic approaches to identify novel transcription factors and pathways that regulate processes such as adipogenesis, lipid handling, insulin resistance, and metabolic memory. His ultimate goal is to define novel targets that can be manipulated to improve outcomes in metabolic disease.
Rosen received his B.S. from Cornell University. He received his M.D. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. He completed his residency in Internal Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a Fellowship in Endocrinology at Massachusetts General Hospital. He received his post-doctoral training in the lab of Bruce Spiegelman at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
Our laboratory is interested in the biology of the adipocyte in health and disease. Many projects within the lab are centered on the idea that understanding the transcriptional pathways by which adipocytes develop and govern their physiology can lead to therapeutic advances. We are also working on mechanisms by which adipocytes regulate insulin sensitivity and metabolic homeostasis both internally and systemically. Much of our work involves integrating epigenomic and expression data to yield insights into novel transcriptional pathways in adipocyte biology. The predictions generated by these unbiased approaches are then validated using a variety of ‘wet lab’ approaches, including gain- and loss-of-function studies in vitro and in vivo. For example, we have used modified histone mapping to identify six novel transcription factors regulating adipogenesis, lipolysis, lipogenesis, and thermogenesis. More recently we have turned to modeling disease states in adipocytes, such as insulin resistance, using similar approaches. These studies are being performed in cell culture and in vivo, including a large effort in human subjects.
