The Carl Ludwig Lectureship Award honours a world-renowned, distinguished investigator who has made major contributions toward a better understanding of some aspect of autonomic regulation in normal and/or disease states. It is the most prestigious award offered by the Neural Control and Autonomic Regulation (NCAR) section of the American Physiological Society (APS). The recipient is chosen by the NCAR section steering committee as a representative of the best within this discipline who is actively involved in innovative and productive research.
The Carl Ludwig Award is one of 12 APS distinguished lectureship awards named after outstanding contributors to different areas of physiology as represented by the 12 APS sections. This award honours the achievements of Carl Ludwig, a prominent professor of physiology in the mid and late 1800s.
On 5 April 2022, the 2023 Carl Ludwig Lectureship Award was given to Associate Professor Ana Domingos at the Experimental Biology meeting held in Philadelphia, USA.
On receipt of the Award, Prof Domingos said: "It is a great honour to be awarded the Carl Ludwig distinguished Lectureship by the APS. This means that my laboratory has made significant advancement in the field of neural control and autonomic regulation.
"I’m proud my laboratory demonstrated that sympathetic nerves resident in white fat are the efferent arm on the neuroendocrine loop of leptin action in the brain (published in Cell, 2015, Nature Communications, 2017). We then discovered Sympathetic neuron-Associated Macrophages (SAMs) that directly import and metabolize NE. Abrogation of SAM function promotes long-term amelioration of obesity independently of food intake (Nature Medicine, 2017). These findings inspired the development of a new class of anti-obesity compounds named sympathofacilitators, which do not enter the brain, nor have the typical cardiovascular side effects of centrally acting sympathomimetic drugs (Cell Metabolism, 2020). Sympathofacilitator drugs act as an energy sink by coupling thermogenesis to active heat dissipation."
The 2018 Lectureship was awarded to Head of Department Professor David Paterson, who was in attendance at the Award announcement ceremony.
Professor Paterson said: "I am delighted that Ana has won this very prestigious award lecture from APS, which is the top award in the USA in autonomic neuroscience."