Anthony Ferrante Jr. Named to New Research Role at Diabetes Center

Anthony W. Ferrante Jr., MD, PhD, has been appointed associate director of research at the Naomi Berrie Diabetes Center, effective Jan. 1, 2022.

The appointment was announced by Anil K. Rustgi, MD, Interim Executive Vice President and Dean of the Faculties of Health Sciences and Medicine.

Ferrante was born and spent his childhood in the Soundview Section of the Bronx. After graduating from Yale College, he joined the Medical Scientist Training Program at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and came to Columbia to train in the internal medicine residency program.

He was awarded a Lucille Markey Fellowship to study under Rudy Leibel and in 1999 became the inaugural Naomi Berrie Diabetes Fellow. After completing his fellowship, he joined the VP&S faculty and is now chief of the Division of Preventive Medicine & Nutrition and the Tilden-Weger-Bieler Professor of Medicine. He also co-directs the doctoral program in nutritional and metabolic biology and serves as associate director of the New York Nutrition Obesity Research Center in the Department of Medicine.

Funded extensively through the NIH, Ferrante’s research focuses on how adipose tissue interacts with the immune system, regulates body weight, and contributes to complications of obesity. His finding that obesity leads to the accumulation of macrophages in adipose tissue helped establish the field of immunometabolism and has become one of the most cited works by a VP&S faculty member.

He was elected to the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the Association of American Physicians and serves on advisory boards of several diabetes and obesity research centers.