Biography: Carel le Roux

Excerpt

Professor Carel le Roux was awarded the Anglo-American Open scholarship which enabled him to be the first in his family to attend University. He graduated from medical school in Pretoria, South Africa in 1996. While completing his medical degree, he represented South Africa at the Track and Field World Championships in 1995, Commonwealth Games in 1994 and won the All African Championships in 1993. After graduating, he moved to the UK initially with the intention to return to South Africa after a year. Those plans changed after he met Jenny and decided to complete his specialist training in metabolic medicine at St Bartholomew’s Hospitals and the Hammersmith Hospitals in London. He was awarded a Wellcome Clinical Research Fellowship and obtained his PhD from Imperial College London. During his PhD, he became interested in bariatric surgery as a method to maintain long-term weight loss. Working in Sir Steve Bloom’s lab, he was lucky enough to have access to a wide array of gut hormone assays. He fortuitously was given access to patients after Roux-en-Y gastric bypass surgery and measured their post prandial gut hormone responses. He invited three or four patients at a time to have the 3-h mixed meal tests, and it was while he was performing venepuncture that he eavesdropped on their conversations. Listening to the patients share with each other, all the changes they experienced after surgery enabled him to formulate research questions which served him for the next 20 years of his career. He was part of the first wave of clinician scientists to explore how the gut was able to increase signalling to the brain after bariatric surgery. This opened new vistas on the possibilities of bariatric surgery as biological treatments for the biological disease of obesity. …