Ana Paula Arruda is one of seven new faculty members at Rausser College this year. The College looks forward to her contributions to our community—from groundbreaking research to excellence in teaching. Welcome to Rausser College!
Ana Paula Arruda’s research examines how nutritional stress leads to organelle dysfunction and metabolic deterioration in the context of metabolic diseases such as obesity and diabetes. More specifically, her goal is to understand how nutritional fluctuations in physiology and disease impact the spatio-temporal regulation of organelle architecture and inter-organelle physical communication in metabolic tissues such as liver. Arruda’s research tackles questions such as: What are the metabolic signals that control organelle architecture? What are the functional implications of organelle remodeling and contact sites for systemic metabolic regulation? Using interdisciplinary approaches such as high-resolution fluorescence imaging and ultrastructure microscopy, biochemistry, genetics and physiological studies, her Lab aims to unravel new molecular players and new functional outcomes of inter-organelle signaling in metabolic regulation. Arruda earned her master’s and PhD in Biochemistry at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. She then joined Harvard University for her postdoctoral studies supported by a fellowship from PEW trusts. Before joining Rausser College as Assistant Professor, she worked as a research scientist at the Sabri Ülker Center at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Read about incoming faculty to other departments here.