Speaker: Rozenn N Lemaitre, PhD, MPH

Dr. Lemaitre is Research Professor of Medicine in the Cardiovascular Health Research Unit at the University of Washington. With expertise in epidemiology and biochemistry, her decades of innovative and highly collaborative NIH-supported research research sits at the nexus of nutrition, genetics, and lipidomics with cardiovascular diabetes and diabetes. Through leadership of several large research consortia and multidisciplinary projects, she has brought together teams of basic, clinical, and population health investigators to apply cutting edge methods to fatty acids and fatty acid derivatives in human health and disease. With her colleagues, she has measured individual sphingolipid species with different saturated fatty acids in several NHLBI-supported cohort studies, revealing striking differences between sphingomyelins with different saturated fatty acids and the risks of incident heart failure, atrial fibrillation and total mortality, often with parallel findings for circulating ceramides. 

Her talk will focus on evidence that contrasts beneficial effects of circulating very long-chain saturated fatty acids on cardiometabolic health with those of the most prevalent, archetypal “bad guy” fatty acid: palmitic acid; and how these surprising findings opened the way to new understanding of ceramide and sphingomyelin biology that have direct and translatable implications for cardiometabolic health and disease. 

Research Grand Rounds are sponsored by the Georgetown-Howard Universities Center for Clinical and Translational Science (GHUCCTS) and our partner institutions to bring together our diverse clinical and research communities to share research that spans disciplines and stages of translation to improve individual and community health.

For more information, please contact research@medstar.net or visit our Research Grand Rounds tab on our Seminars and Workshops page.