We seek support for the continuation of a highly successful, multi-center and multi-departmental training program at UT Southwestern Medical Center that provides M.D. and Ph.D. trainees with a firm basis in state-of-the-art methodologies, in addition to preparing them for future academic careers in metabolism research. The program under the auspices of this T32 has been running for the past 44 years. Established investigators from several Departments and a number of Centers join forces to provide our trainees with a multi-facetted and diverse training program. Participating Centers include the Touchstone Center for Diabetes Research, the Center for Hypothalamic Research, the Center for Human Nutrition, the Advanced Imaging Research Center, the McDermott Center for Human Genetics, Center for the Genetics of Host Defense and the Simmons Cancer Center. Areas of expertise include systemic and cellular metabolism, diabetes, lipid biosynthesis, obesity, human genetics related to metabolic disorders and tumor metabolism. Our T32 mentors direct highly competitive research programs of national and international stature. Our trainees can take advantage of a very strong research infrastructure that allows them to address physiological, biochemical and cell biological problems with emerging technologies and the latest instrumentation. The 56 mentors are chosen from a tightly interwoven, highly integrated group of investigators, which cover all of the relevant areas in metabolism research and a number of sub-specialties in endocrine research. Metabolism research at UT Southwestern has flourished over the past 15 years, due to the programmatic expansion over the previous period from 2007-2022. The school has made a major commitment towards complementing existing areas of expertise by targeted recruitment of key personnel to fill existing gaps over the past decade. Here, we build upon the historic strengths of our training program, while taking advantage of the programmatic expansion experienced at UT Southwestern. This T32 is an important cornerstone of metabolic research at UT Southwestern. We have implemented a number of changes that have proven highly successful to further improve the quality of our training experience. During the previous funding period (2018-2022), 7 trainees completed the program, or are currently in the program; most of which have successfully applied for external funding. The current epidemic of obesity and its pathophysiological sequelae is on an exponential rise. It is paramount to train the next generation of metabolism researchers and endocrinologists to cope with this enormous public health problem, and further, to develop innovative approaches to combat metabolic dysfunction. Furthermore, we now appreciate that we are facing a serious public health issue in light of the fact that Covid-19 further increases the potential to become a type 2 diabetic risk if certain factors are already present at the time of infection. We aim to tra...