Johan Auwerx is Professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he occupies the Nestle Chair in Energy Metabolism.   Dr. Auwerx has been using molecular physiology and systems genetics to understand mitochondrial function and how it affects metabolic homeostasis in health, aging and disease. Much of his work focused on understanding how diet, exercise, hormones, and stressors control mitochondrial function through changing the expression of genes by altering the activity of transcription factors and their associated cofactors. His research validated several transcription factors and/or cofactors as novel targets to treat metabolic diseases and spurred the clinical use of compounds that modulate these transcriptional pathways. Johan Auwerx was elected as a member of EMBO in 2003 and has received many international scientific prizes. Dr. Auwerx received both his MD and PhD in Molecular Endocrinology at the Katholieke Universiteit in Leuven, Belgium. He was a post-doctoral research fellow in the Departments of Medicine and Genetics of the University of Washington in Seattle.