Frankie D. Heyward, Ph.D.

Frankie Heyward is an assistant professor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center with appointments in internal medicine and neuroscience. His lab investigates neuroepigenetic mechanisms regulating synaptic plasticity in the hypothalamus, their role in maintaining body weight set-point and their dysregulation during obesity, weight regain and aging-related impairments in appetite. His group employs bulk and single-cell multiomic genome-wide assessments of gene expression, epigenetic modifications, chromatin accessibility and transcription factor DNA binding dynamics as well as mouse genetic and epigenome engineering tools.

Heyward completed his postdoctoral research fellowship at Harvard Medical School. He then became an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Division of Endocrinology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, working with Evan Rosen. During his postdoctoral work, he studied transcriptional regulation within a population of AgRP neurons within the hypothalamus that control hunger. Using an integrated transcriptional and chromatin accessibility profiling approach during states of hunger and leptin-mediated hunger suppression, he identified interferon regulatory factor 3 (IRF3) as a key mediator of leptin’s acute hunger-suppressing effects.

Heyward earned his Ph.D. in neurobiology from the University of Alabama at Birmingham under David Sweatt, investigating the epigenetic basis of obesity-induced cognitive impairment.