Paul A. Marks Professor and Chair, Department of Genetics and Development, Columbia University Medical Center Dr. Karsenty's lecture will go over the novel endocrine regulations of bone mass and the novel function of bones. Dr. Karsenty is an endocrinologist who became a research scientist after obtaining two NIH research fellowships in the 1980s. He has made many fundamental contributions to understanding skeletal development and skeletal physiology. His laboratory has studied every aspect of skeletal biology ranging from cell differentiation to function. The overarching assumption of his current work is that the appearance of bone during evolution has changed profoundly the physiology of animals because of the energetic cost that bone modeling and remodeling entails. Thus in the last 10 years his group has explored the hypothesis that the control of bone mass and energy metabolism must be coordinated and that this coordination is done in large part by hormones like leptin and osteocalcin that appear during evolution with bone, not with energy metabolism. Dr. Karsenty is the 2010 recipient of the Richard Lounsberry Award given jointly by the U.S. National Academy of Science and the French Academy of Science. He received his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Paris and completed his post-doctoral training at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in 1990.