Emilio Mottillo, a second-year graduate student working in the Wayne State University School of Medicine's Department of Pathology, has been awarded a highly competitive Doctoral Research Award by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

"I am very excited about the news," said Mottillo, who lives with his wife and daughter in his hometown, Windsor, Ontario, and commutes daily to the campus. "The fellowship is a highly prestigious honor."

The three-year fellowship includes an annual stipend of $30,000 and $5,000 each year to fund Mottillo's research.

"This is a very competitive fellowship with very few awards being made each year, and rarely to Canadians working in U.S. labs," said James Granneman, Ph.D., professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience and of Pathology, who serves as advisor to Mottillo.

Mottillo received his master's degree from the University of Windsor and began work as a research assistant at Wayne State University. He is earning his doctorate degree in the pathology program at the School of Medicine.

The project that Mottillo and Dr. Granneman are working on involves detecting how a fat cell receptor increases metabolism to promote fat burning.

"Obesity is associated with various disease states such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease, and has become a large burden on our health care system," Dr. Granneman said. "Current treatments for obesity-associated complications act by improving the function of fat tissue. We study the mechanisms by which a fat cell-specific receptor (the beta3-adrenergic receptor B3-AR) increases metabolism and promotes burning of fat. Free fatty acids are strongly implicated in the effects of B3-AR activation; thus, our research plan is to understand how free fatty acids modify the ability of fat cells to burn energy."

Understanding this relationship, he said, could result in novel treatments that promote weight loss, improving a number of health conditions associated with and exacerbated by obesity.