Qi Wu, Ph.D. joined the faculty as an Assistant Professor on Jan 9. His research interests are in the neurobiology of feeding behavior. Dr. Wu is the inaugural hire of the University of Iowa Obesity Initiative, and will be a member of the Fraternal Order of the Eagle’s Diabetes Research Center. Dr. Wu received his Ph.D. in Cell Biology from the University of Georgia, Athens, GA and then performed postdoctoral research with Dr. Richard Palmiter, Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Department of Biochemistry, University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, WA. Qi performed ground breaking work showing that loss of GABAergic signaling by AgRP-expressing neurons that make connections from the arcuate nucleus to the parabrachial nucleus leads to starvation. His research has been published in Cell, Nature Neuroscience, PNAS, Neuron, and J Neuroscience.

Kamal Rahmouni, Ph.D. officially joined the department as a primary faculty member on Jan 3. Kamal is an Associate Professor and holds a secondary appointment in Internal Medicine. Kamal received his Ph.D. in Pharmacology from the University Louis Pasteur, Strasbourg, France, and then performed postdoctoral training in the neural control of obesity at the University of Iowa Cardiovascular Center. He was appointed as an Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine at UI in 2005 and was recently promoted to Associate Professor in July 2011. He is a member of the Center on Functional Genomics of Hypertension and the Iowa Cardiovascular Center. Kamal has published over 70 papers, reviews and chapters. His papers are published in very distinguished journals including PNAS, Diabetes, Circulation Research, Hypertension, Cell Metabolism, and Nature Medicine.