Profile of John R. Speakman

Abstract

John Speakman’s interest in science was spurred by his early interest in birds. “I was a very keen birdwatcher, and I used to spend lots of time watching birds in my youth,” he says. At age 16, he would go to the same site every day to count small wading birds and try to work out the factors influencing their numbers. John R. Speakman. Image credit: Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. When he was deciding which university to attend, Speakman scoured university prospectuses, looking for researchers who studied wading birds and ended up choosing the University of Stirling in Scotland, where he was able to work on waders for his undergraduate project. He decided to stay at the university for his doctorate and continued studying wading birds with the same supervisor, David Bryant. “He gave me lots of guidance but also let me pursue my own thing, and I really enjoyed doing that,” says Speakman. “That basically cemented the idea that a career in science was the way for me to go,” he says. During a long and fruitful scientific career, Speakman has studied fundamental questions about energy balance. Much of his work has focused on understanding the factors governing variations in food intake and energy expenditure across a wide range of species, and he is a leading expert in the use of isotopes to measure energy expenditure and metabolism. Speakman’s research has contributed greatly to researchers’ understanding of how energy balance can influence obesity and aging. Speakman is currently a professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shenzhen, China and at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. In his Inaugural Article, Speakman used data from mouse studies to investigate the mechanisms underlying caloric restriction, an approach to slow down aging by restricting caloric intake …