Philip A. Wood, DVM, PhD
Dr. Philip A. Wood is a basic scientist, author, lecturer, and medical school professor. He was born in Illinois and subsequently grew up in Kansas. In 1980 he received his DVM and MS degrees from Kansas State University and in 1983 received his PhD in Experimental Pathology from University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). From 1983-1988 he was on the faculty in the Institute for Molecular Genetics at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. In 1989, Dr. Wood returned to UAB as an Associate Professor. He was appointed as a Professor in 1996, and served as Chairman of the UAB Department of Genomics and Pathobiology from 1996-2002. At UAB Dr. Wood is currently Professor and Director of the Division of Genomics in the Department of Genetics, as well as Professor of Nutrition Sciences, Physiology and Biophysics, and a Senior Scientist in the UAB Clinical Nutrition Research Center. Dr. Wood has published more than 75 peer reviewed papers and has lectured about fatty acid metabolism and genetics throughout the world. He enjoys speaking to academic medical audiences, as well as lay audiences about the impact of genetics, diet, physical activity and drugs on diseases of excess fat. He has recently published the book How Fat Works (Harvard University Press, 2006). He lives with his wife Judy in Birmingham, while their two sons attend Auburn University.
Research Interests
Genetics of Fatty Acid Metabolism in Disease
Dr. Wood has had an extended interest in the inborn errors of mitochondrial fatty acid b-oxidation. These are relatively rare disorders mostly of young children. These children have severe intolerance to fasting. Their disease episodes occur as a response to fasting or other severe metabolic stress and result in acute hypoglycemia, fatty liver, metabolic acidosis, cardiac disorders and sometimes sudden death. In order to study these diseases, Dr. Wood’s research group has developed and used six different mouse models of mitochondrial fatty acid oxidation enzyme deficiencies.
Another area Dr. Wood and his research team are pursuing is using the fatty acid metabolism pathway as a “candidate pathway†for understanding the genetics/genomics of insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes mellitus. To that end they are looking at interactions between genomes and nutrition that promote for the problems of excess fatty acids in the body combined with deficient fatty acid oxidation. The problem of excess fatty acids is pivotal in the development of insulin resistance and diabetes. These studies involve investigating the interactions of quantitative trait loci (modfier genes) that promote for insulin resistance/diabetes in combination with inherited defects of fatty acid oxidation, and how diets with high amounts of simple carbohydrates and “unhealthy†fats further aggravate the development of these diseases.
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