Robert H. Eckel, MD

Dr. Robert H. Eckel is a Distinguished Alumnus of the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and the former Charles A Boettcher II Endowed Chair in Atherosclerosis at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. He is Professor of Medicine Emeritus with appointments in the Division of Endocrinology, Metabolism and Diabetes and the Division of Cardiology at UC Denver

Dr. Eckel is Professor of Medicine Emeritus at the University of Colorado Anschtuz Medical Campus and past Director of the Lipid Clinic at the University of Colorado Hospital.

Prior to August 2014, Dr. Eckel directed the Clinical Translational Research Center Network, a component of the Colorado Clinical Translational Sciences Institute, and served as Program Director of the Adult General Clinical Research Center for 15 years.

From 2018-2019, he served as interim Vice Chancellor of Research at the University of Colorado Anschtuz Medical Campus. He has previously served as a member of the Scientific Advisory Council of the National Institute of Diabetes, Digestive and Kidney Diseases at the National Institutes of Health and is a past president of the American Heart Association and current president of Medicine and Science of the American Diabetes Association.

For over three decades, his NIH-funded translational research has focused on the pathophysiology and treatment of lipid disorders, insulin action, nutrition, obesity, and Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes and how these metabolic disorders relate to cardiovascular disease. More recently, his laboratory has been directed to the role of lipid and lipoprotein metabolism in neurodegenerative diseases, such as multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer’s disease.

His team has used molecular and biochemical tools, tissue culture, calorimetry, dietary perturbations and euglycemic clamps to study energy intake, energy expenditure, and insulin action on the biological impact of lipoprotein lipid partitioning in humans and genetically modified mice with tissue-specific over-expression or deletion of lipid-related genes, typically lipoprotein lipase.