Prize winner 2020

Price winner

Niels Grarup, Associate Professor
Copenhagen university, DK

This year’s recipient of the Leif C. Groop award is Associate Professor and MD Niels Grarup, active at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research at Copenhagen University. His research interests focus on genetic variation associated with type 2 diabetes. In this endeavour, he performs detailed pathophysiological characterization of identified disease-associated genetic variants. The prize committee’s interest was particularly caught by the ground-breaking studies of the Inuit population on Greenland. Grarup and his colleagues identified a genetic variant in a crucial protein in insulin signalling, which creates a clinically relevant loss-of-function phenotype of insulin resistance. Rarely have such elegant studies formed the basis of such an intriguing and clinically relevant story.