image: Dr. Steven Heymsfield of Pennington Biomedical Research Center
Credit: PBRC
BATON ROUGE – Pennington Biomedical Research Center is proud to announce that Dr. Steven B. Heymsfield, Professor of Metabolism and Body Composition, has been named a Boyd Professor of Louisiana State University – the highest faculty rank and honor awarded within the LSU System.
The Boyd Professorship is reserved for faculty whose outstanding achievements and international reputations bring significant prestige to LSU. Dr. Heymsfield joins an elite group of scholars recognized for advancing knowledge and transforming their fields.
"Dr. Heymsfield represents the pinnacle of scientific excellence in the fields of obesity, metabolism, and body composition research," remarked Dr. John Kirwan, Executive Director of Pennington Biomedical. "His revolutionary insights and profound contributions to medical science have positioned Pennington Biomedical, LSU, and the state of Louisiana as internationally recognized centers of innovation. We are deeply honored to have him as both an esteemed colleague and a pioneering force who continues to reshape our field."
Dr. Heymsfield’s career spans more than four decades of pioneering work that has reshaped our understanding of human energy balance, body composition and obesity treatment. He has authored more than 1,300 scientific publications, including several landmark studies cited by researchers worldwide, with nearly 79,000 citations and an H-index of 140 – placing him among the top 500 most-cited researchers globally.
Over a career spanning more than five decades, he developed advances in clinical nutrition, imaging technologies, metabolic modeling, and obesity therapeutics, with innovations that are now standard practice worldwide. His transformative work ranges from developing flexible feeding tubes that revolutionized enteral nutrition, to creating advanced imaging and body composition methods using CT, DXA, and 3D optical scanning, to building physiologically grounded energy metabolism models that have reshaped obesity science.
He played a major role in developing evaluation protocols and treatment methods related to protein-calorie malnutrition, sarcopenia, obesity and other disorders associated with adipose tissue and skeletal muscle. Over the past several years, he has worked on developing new imaging devices such as 3D laser body scanning for phenotyping body shape, including machine-learning algorithms, as related to body composition.
Dr. Heymsfield participates in an international group with colleagues at Harvard, Cornell, and Cambridge universities focused on elaborating the mechanisms of cancer cachexia at the genetic, molecular and whole-body levels in animal models and in humans with advanced malignancies.
Dr. Heymsfield is a past president of several leading organizations, including The Obesity Society, the American Society of Clinical Nutrition, and the American Society of Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition. In 2020, he served as a member of the U.S. Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, shaping national nutrition policy. He was Executive Director of Pennington Biomedical from 2010-2013
Throughout his career, Dr. Heymsfield has been widely recognized for his contributions to science and public health. Among his many honors are the George A. Bray Founders Award from The Obesity Society (2016); the W.O. Atwater Award from the American Society for Nutrition (2018); and an appointment as an Amazon Scholar (2021–2023), where he collaborated with Amazon scientists to advance digital health innovations.
Dr. Heymsfield becomes Pennington Biomedical’s fifth Boyd Professor, joining David York, George Bray, Eric Ravussin and Claude Bouchard as Boyd honorees.
About the Pennington Biomedical Research Center
The Pennington Biomedical Research Center is at the forefront of medical discovery as it relates to understanding the triggers of obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer and dementia. Pennington Biomedical has the vision to lead the world in promoting nutrition and metabolic health and eliminating metabolic disease through scientific discoveries that create solutions from cells to society. The center conducts basic, clinical, and population research, and is a campus in the LSU System.
The research enterprise at Pennington Biomedical includes over 600 employees within a network of 44 clinics and research laboratories, and 16 highly specialized core service facilities. Its scientists and physician/scientists are supported by research trainees, lab technicians, nurses, dietitians, and other support personnel. Pennington Biomedical is a globally recognized state-of-the-art research institution in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
For more information, see www.pbrc.edu.