Philipp Scherer is Professor and Director of the Touchstone Diabetes Center at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Basel, Switzerland, with Jeff Schatz, followed by post-doctoral training the Whitehead Institute at MIT in Cambridge with Harvey Lodish. In 1997, he joined the faculty of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine where he was a Professor for Cell Biology and Medicine. Throughout his career, he has maintained an interest in processes related to cellular and systemic energy homeostasis. During his Ph.D., he identified several components of the mitochondrial protein import machinery. While a post-doc, he identified adiponectin, one of the first secretory factors to be described that almost exclusively originate in adipose tissue and which is currently widely studied by many different research groups.

Current efforts in his laboratory are focused on the identification and physiological characterization of novel proteins that serve as potential links between the adipocyte, liver, the pancreatic beta cell and the processes of whole body energy homeostasis, inflammation, cancer and cardiovascular disease. His research team aims to identify novel targets for pharmacological intervention and to further define the role of adipose tissue as an endocrine organ.

Scherer has been on the faculty of UT Southwestern Medical Center since 2007 as a member of the Departments of Internal Medicine and Cell Biology. He holds the Gifford O. Touchstone Jr. and Randolph G. Touchstone Distinguished Chair in Diabetes Research and is a member of the Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center. He was awarded the 2015 Banting Medal for Scientific Achievement from the American Diabetes Association (the highest ranked diabetes prize in the world), the 2017 European Association for the Study of Diabetes Novo Nordisk Foundation Diabetes Prize for Excellence (the highest honor for a diabetes researcher in Europe) and the 2018 Manpei Suzuki International Prize for Diabetes Research (highest honor in diabetes research in Japan).

Dr. Scherer has published more than 400 papers in the areas of diabetes, cardiovascular disease and obesity/cancer, has been cited more than 45,000 times and has an h-factor (Thompson-Reuters) of 105. He is amongst the 100 most highly cited researchers in biomedical research from 2004-2014 according to Thompson-Reuters.