Bart Staels, PhD., Full Professor, University of Lille, is director of the Inserm Unit UMR 1011 with laboratories on the campus of the Institut Pasteur de Lille and the Health Faculty of the University of Lille, Lille, France. Pr. Staels earned his doctorate at the Institute for Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Leuven, Belgium. He completed postdoctoral work at the Metabolic Research Unit, University of California, San Francisco and was postdoctoral research fellow of the BioAvenir Project, Paris, France. He was Senior Member of the Institut Universitaire de France (2011-16). He is co-founder and board member of the European Genomic Institute for Diabetes (EGID, Lille). He is appointed European corresponding member of the National Academy of Pharmacy (2011-) and received the International Francqui Professor Chair (2013). Pr. Staels is also co-founder of Genfit SA, and president of its Scientific Advisory Board. Pr. Staels’ transdisciplinary research covers the fields of obesity, diabetes, hepatic and cardiovascular diseases focussing on molecular pharmacology of these cardio-metabolic diseases. He particularly studies the role of nuclear receptors (such as the PPARs, FXR, Rev-erb and RORs in the control of inflammation and lipid and glucose homeostasis as well as the transcriptional mechanisms involved. Pr. Staels was among the first to identify a crucial role for the nuclear receptor PPAR in the control of lipid and glucose metabolism as well as cardiovascular function in humans. He elucidated the action mechanism of the fibrate class of drugs used in the treatment of lipid disorders and worked also on the action mechanism of the glitazones, a class of anti-diabetic drugs. His work has identified the PPAR transcription factors as potential drug targets for the treatment of diabetes, dyslipidemia, cardiovascular disease and NAFLD, which contributed to the development of several novel therapeutic compounds. To date, Pr. Staels has published >900 papers, including 220 review articles, published abstracts and several book chapters.