Adjunct and Affiliate Appointments

Dr. Cintia Folgueira is a Principal Investigator at the Instituto de Investigación Sanitaria de Santiago de Compostela (IDIS) in Spain. Her research focuses on neuroendocrine and peripheral mechanisms regulating energy balance, with a particular emphasis on obesity, diabetes, and thermogenesis. She earned her PhD in Endocrinology from the University of Santiago de Compostela and completed postdoctoral training at the Spanish National Center for Cardiovascular Research (CNIC), where she investigated stress kinases in metabolic regulation. Dr. Folgueira has been recognized with several prestigious awards, including the EASO-Novo Nordisk New Investigator Award in Basic Science, the EFSD-Lilly Young Investigator Award, and the SEEDO Rising Star Award.

Dan Higgins is an affiliate instructor in PMM. Dan has a Master of Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology specializing in “Interactive Intelligence” and a Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science and Mathematics from Assumption University. Dan has more than 20 years of IT industry experience, with ten years in Enterprise Architecture and Framework Development. He is a Cloud Architect with AWS certifications in Machine Learning and Solution Architecture. He has played key roles in numerous projects, including the creation of a next-generation solution for a Whole-Genome Data Repository and the development of WormCat, a categorization and visualization tool for genome-scale data. 

Marie is an Assistant Professor at the Novo Nordisk Foundation of Basic Metabolic Research at the University of Copenhagen studying brown adipose tissue metabolism and function. She was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie scholar in Dr. David Guertin’s laboratory in the Program in Molecular Medicine from 2021 to 2023 and remains a close collaborator with Dr. Guertin’s group. Marie has been conducting research in the field on brown fat since 2010.

Adjunct Professor of Molecular Medicine, UMass Chan, is presently Professor of Clinical Integrative Physiology and Head of the Section of Integrative Physiology at the Department of Molecular Medicine and Surgery and the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology at Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm Sweden, where she is Director of the The Strategic Research Programme in Diabetes. She is also Professor of Integrative Physiology at University of Copenhagen, where she is a Scientific Director at the Marie Krogh Center for Metabolic Research, Copenhagen Denmark.