Professor Roberto Coppari is a Full Professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Geneva, Switzerland. In 2015, he founded the Faculty Diabetes Center, which he has directed until 2025. He is also the Academic Director of the Metabolic Core facility of the Faculty of Medicine since 2017.

Prof. Coppari earned a PhD in Neuroscience in 2002 and completed his postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA, USA. His independent academic career began in 2007 when he was appointed Assistant Professor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, TX, where he remained until the end of 2012.

His research has been, and continues to be, funded by prestigious organizations such as the European Research Council (ERC Consolidator and Proof of Concept grants), the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH RO1 grants), the Swiss Cancer League, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, and the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Prof. Coppari has organized several national and international scientific meetings. He is a member of the Direction Committee of the Lausanne Integrative Metabolism and Nutrition Alliance (LAMNA) and sits on the Dean’s Advisory Board of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Geneva. He is an elected member of the National Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation where he has a double mandate in the Programme Committees LTRI and TSOR.

Research Objectives

Cancer and Diabetes Metabolism

The goal of the Coppari laboratory is the understanding of whole-body physiological and metabolic function with the ambition of applying this knowledge to human health and disease in the context of obesity, diabetes and cancer. To achieve this goal, the laboratory performs different physiological in vivo studies (mostly in rodents) and experiments with murine and human cell lines. To further test the hypothesis and gain mechanistic insights, the laboratory uses unbiased approaches such as metabolomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and ribosome profiling. The results of these studies led to significant contributions to the field of physiology, cancer and metabolism. For example, the Coppari laboratory unravelled new putative targets for the treatment of metabolic and cancerous diseases (e.g. FKBP10, PTPRg, S100A9) and is currently developing strategies to transfer these discoveries from the laboratory to the clinic. One example is the University of Geneva spin-off Diatheris SA which Prof. Coppari co-founded in 2023; a company developing new drugs for diabetic patients (https://www.diatheris.com/).

Prof. Coppari is also President of a non-profit organization aiming at raising funds to support research in the context of diabetes (https://diagenassociation.com).