Manu Verma

Biography

Manu was awarded the Novo Nordisk Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in 2016 to work with Dr Costas Christodoulides and Prof Fredrik Karpe at the Oxford Centre for Diabetes, Endocrinology & Metabolism, University of Oxford.

His fellowship focussed on investigating Diabetes, Fat Distribution and Obesity GWAS association signals in context of WNT signalling and human adipose tissue biology. To achieve this, he had utilised in vitro functional experiments in human cells and cellular models, pre-clinical models of obesity and adipose phenotyping in carriers of common and low frequency risk variants that is associated with Diabetes, Fat distribution and/or Obesity in GWAS. He presented his work at several international meeting including oral presentations at the 54^th EASD Berlin meeting (2018), 44^th ATDG Edinburgh meeting (2018) and a poster presentation at the Keystone Banff meeting (2020). Publications arising from these works are in preparation.

In April 2020, he was recruited to Novo Nordisk Research Centre Oxford as a Postdoctoral Scientist in Functional Genomics. Here, he continues to develop his research interest in human adipose biology, human genetics and functional genomics. Here, he is leading several projects aimed at identifying therapeutic targets to maintain metabolic health in context of human adipose biology. To achieve this, he is using a combination of human cells & cellular models, in vitro functional assays, single cell transcriptomic and epigenomic profiling and high throughput phenotypic screens.