Klein recognized by Endocrine Society for outstanding research
Clinician-scientist specializes in obesity and metabolic disease
Samuel Klein, MD, the director of the Center for Human Nutrition and the Division of Nutritional Science & Obesity Medicine has been named the recipient of the Endocrine Society’s Laureate Award for Outstanding Clinical Investigator.
Samuel Klein, MD, the William H. Danforth Professor of Medicine and Nutritional Science at WashU Medicine, has been named the recipient of the Endocrine Society’s Laureate Award for Outstanding Clinical Investigator. The annual award recognizes an accomplished scientist who has made substantial contributions to the understanding of the progression and treatment of endocrine and metabolic diseases.
Klein, who is director of the Center for Human Nutrition and the Division of Nutritional Science & Obesity Medicine in the WashU Medicine John T. Milliken Department of Medicine, uses sophisticated research tools to test clinically relevant hypotheses in human subjects. He has successfully integrated stable isotope tracers, abdominal vein catheterization, microdialysis probes, multi-omics and cellular analyses of tissue samples to simultaneously study cellular, regional and whole-body metabolic function. Klein’s research activities are focused on understanding the mechanisms responsible for the heterogeneity in metabolic dysfunction associated with obesity and the therapeutic effects of weight loss. He has also led important clinical trials that evaluated the effects of body fat removal by liposuction and weight loss induced by different diets, bariatric surgery and exercise training on cardiometabolic function.
Klein has had consistent R01 funding from the NIH since 1990 and has published more than 500 papers in nutrition and metabolism, particularly related to obesity, metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease and diabetes.
Klein earned his medical degree at Temple University and completed his internal medicine residency and a clinical nutrition fellowship at Boston Medical Center and a nutrition and metabolism research fellowship at Harvard Medical School. He earned a master’s degree in nutritional biochemistry and metabolism from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and completed a subsequent fellowship in gastroenterology at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. He joined the WashU Medicine faculty in 1994.
