Dr. Kemper is Professor Emeritus of Molecular & Integrative Physiology. Her lab focuses on metabolic signaling and epigenomic control of metabolism and energy balance.

The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign recently hosted the 4th Big Ten Academic Alliance Lipid meeting, bringing together dozens of scientists from across the country to share their expertise on how lipids impact metabolic diseases.

A new study, published in JCI insight, looks at how Brd4, a regulator of the innate immune response, influences diet-induced obesity. The researchers believe that Brd4 could be used as a target for obesity and insulin resistance.

The liver has a rare superpower among body organs – the ability to regenerate, even if 70% of its mass is removed. It also keeps up its metabolic and toxin-removing work during the process of regeneration, thanks to a subset of cells that expand their workload while the rest focus on multiplication...

Obesity is rising in prevalence and poses a major concern for the health of our general population. Currently affecting over one-third of the population of the United States, obesity is often comorbid with other diseases, such as diabetes, fatty liver disease, cardiovascular disease, and some...

Gut hormones play an important role in regulating fat production in the body. One key hormone, released a few hours after eating, turns off fat production by regulating gene expression in the liver, but this regulation is abnormal in obesity, researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-...

Bile acids are cholesterol metabolites that are well known for their role in fat digestion. Many liver diseases such as gallstones, fatty liver disease, congenital disorders lead to cholestasis, which is characterized as accumulation of bile acids in the liver. The Anakk laboratory at the...

Autophagy or “self-eating” is a fundamental biological process by which cells digest and recycle cellular components for survival of the cells under nutrient-deprived conditions. Autophagy must be tightly controlled since deficient autophagy is associated with many diseases and aging, while...

The Anakk lab has investigated the metabolic repercussions of deleting the scaffolding protein IQGAP1. These findings were published in a paper entitled "Identification of IQ motif-containing GTPase Activating Protein 1 as a regulator of long-term ketosis" in JCI Insight.

The Anakk lab explored the mechanism by which the liver can be protected from developing fatty liver disease. This work was also published in Hepatology and led by two former undergraduates of the MCB program, Oludemilade Akinrotimi (Demi) and Ryan Riessen along with another MCB alumnus, Phil ...