Dale Schoeller was invited to speak at the ILSI meeting in Puerto Rico in January on "Weight in the Balance: An Overview of the Energy Balance Equation. He was also invited to the Recent Advances and Controversies in Measuring Energy Metabolism to present the Con argument of a debate on the "Relevance of Brown Adipose Tissue to Human Metabolism."

The 2007 results from the Chronicle of Higher Education are in! The Department of Nutritional Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison was ranked 7th in faculty productivity among 375 universities that offer Ph.D. degrees. The productivity of each faculty member was judged on five
factors: books published; journal publications; citations of journal articles; federal-grant dollars awarded; and honors and awards. Congratulations Nutritional Sciences faculty!

Congratulations are in order for Nutritional Sciences Professor Susan Smith for receiving a prestigious MERIT award from the National Institutes of Health. This award is given in recognition of her studies of the effects of fetal alcohol exposure. For more information, go to: http://www.cals.wisc.edu/ecals/index.php/2007/08/24/susan-smith-wins-nih-merit-award-for-fetal-alcohol-research/

The Department of Nutritional Sciences is happy to announce the arrival of Assistant Professor Eric Yen. Eric received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and did his postodoctoral work at the J. David Gladstone Institutes at the University of California-San Francisco. His research addresses the process of fat assimilation and new approaches to prevent or treat obesity and other metabolic diseases associated with excessive fat intake and energy store.

On October 11th, 2007, the Molecular and Applied Nutrition Training Program (MANTP) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison hosted a symposium called, "Recent Advances in the Understanding the Treatment and Etiology of Type II Diabetes." Speakers for 2007 were Dr. Robert Rizza MD (Mayo Clinic), Christopher Newgard PhD (Duke University) and and Philipp Scherrer PhD (Univ. of Texas-Southwestern Medical Center). In addition, former MANTP trainee Jessica (Byers) Flowers also presented her work while a graduate student in the laboratory of trainer Dr. Attie.