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.

Manu’s fellowship focussed on investigating Diabetes, Fat Distribution and Obesity GWAS 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 are 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).

In 2020, Manu was recruited to Novo Nordisk Research Centre Oxford (NNRCO) and has been recently promoted to Senior Research Scientist in Functional Genomics. In his current role, he will continue to lead several research programmes for investigating novel human biology at scale using functional genomics and human genetics data and tools. He is also leading several internal and external discovery efforts in collaborations with Academia, Industry and Biotech. Lastly, he is actively involved in supervision of iCase D.Phil. students at the University of Oxford and Junior Scientists at NNRCO.

TCF7L2 plays a complex role in human adipose progenitor biology, which might contribute to genetic susceptibility to type 2 diabetes. Manu Verma et al. (2022) Metabolism 

RSPO3 impacts body fat distribution and regulates adipose cell biology in vitro. Nellie Y. Loh et al (2019) Nat Commun, 11