Professor José Manuel Fernández-Real is an endocrinologist and a research scientist at the Girona Biomedical Research Institute. He received his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from University of Barcelona, Spain. He is member of the CIBERobn Steering Committee, a Network of Excellence in Obesity Research. He has published > 500 articles indexed in PubMed, an H index of 97 and >37,500 citations (Google Scholar). He is Principal Investigator of 29 National and International Projects, applicant of 12 patents, and director of 14 doctoral theses. He was the coordinator of the European ThinkGut project (Horizon 2020, POCTEFA, 2020-2022). Since 2019, he has been involved in 3 other European projects: Innovative Medicines Initiative, HDHL-JPI, and Innovative Training Network. He is among the 40 most cited authors in the world in the field of Endocrinology (Google Scholar) and in the top 1% (in the top 0.6%) of most cited authors in all scientific fields (Stanford-University).

Research interests

In the last 5 years, our Research interests have been focused on the microbiota, and particularly its interactions with metabolic disorders and cognition: several signatures of the microbiome were associated with fatty liver (2 articles Nature Medicine in 2018 and 1 in Microbiome, 2021) and short-term memory and food addition in subjects with obesity (Cell Metab. 2020, J Clin Invest 2022). We have also shown the impact of dietary proline on the development of depressive traits in subjects with obesity through changes in the gut microbiome (Cell Metab 2022), and the first observations linking bacteriopahges of the gut microbiome to cognition (Cell Host & Microbe, 2022). A recent invited review summarized the interaction among iron, the gut microbiota and glucose metabolism (Nature Reviews Endocrinol 2022). Funding from international (EU H2020, Guts UK, Diabetes UK  and Interreg-POCTEFA and national (Ministry of Health)) competitive calls, with more than 5 M€.

Keywords

obesity, type 2 diabetes, cognition, gut microbiome, chronic inflammation, iron