
Meet our speakers
Discover more about our speakers by clicking on the + icons.
Professor Melanie Davies
-
Professor Melanie Davies, CBE, MB ChB, MD, FRCP, FRCGP, FMedSci, is Professor of Diabetes Medicine at the University of Leicester and an Honorary Consultant Diabetologist at the University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust. She is the Co-Director of the Leicester Diabetes Centre, University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust.
Professor Davies’ research interests include the causes, screening, prevention, self-management and treatment of type 2 diabetes mellitus. She is a National Institute for Health Research Senior Investigator Emeritus and Director of the NIHR Leicester Biomedical Research Centre and Co-Chair of EASD / ADA’s Consensus Report on T2DM Management.
Professor Davies has published over 912 original articles and has over £100 million of grant funding. She was awarded the CBE in the 2016 New Year’s Honour’s List for services to diabetes research.
Sarah Le Brocq
-
Sarah has a unique skillset of living with obesity, a background in science, 16 years’ experience of working in the pharmaceutical industry, alongside the NHS and 6 years’ experience of being a trustee/Director of an obesity charity.
Founder of organisation All About Obesity CIC and known as a Thought Leader in the Obesity space.
Prof Carel le Roux
-
Professor Carel le Roux graduated from medical school in Pretoria South Africa, completed his specialist training in metabolic medicine at St Bartholomew’s Hospitals and the Hammersmith Hospitals. He obtained his PhD from Imperial College London where he later took up a faculty position. He moved to University College Dublin for the Chair in Chemical Pathology and Metabolic Medicine and he is now a Director of the Metabolic Medicine Group. He also holds the position of Professor of Metabolic Medicine at Ulster University and Extra-ordinary Professor of Chemical Pathology at University of Pretoria. He currently coordinates an Innovative Medicine Initiative project on obesity. He previously received the Irish Research Council Researcher of the Year award, a President of Ireland Young Researcher Award, the Irish Research Council Laureate Award, a Clinician Scientist Award from the National Institute Health Research in the UK, and a Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Fellowship for his work on how the gut talks to the brain.
Prof Barbara McGowan
-
Professor Barbara McGowan is a Consultant Endocrinologist at Guy's and St Thomas' Hospital and Professor of Endocrinology and Diabetes at King’s College London. She received her first degree in Biochemistry from Oxford University in 1988, and medical degree from the Royal Free Hospital in 1998. She was awarded a PhD from Imperial College London in 2007 for investigating ‘The role of relaxin-3 on energy homeostasis and the hypothalamic-pituitary-axis’.
She is an investigator for several clinical trials in gut hormone therapies for obesity and was awarded an NIHR/RCP/CRN prize in recognition of outstanding research within the NHS. Professor McGowan is a Board member for the International Society for Endocrinology and co-chairs EASO’s Obesity Task Force. She is the recipient of the 2024 KCL Faculty of Life Sciences and Medicine Research Impact on Society Award and the 2025 Outstanding Clinical Practitioner Award by the Society for Endocrinology.
Professor Alex Miras
-
Alex Miras is Professor of Endocrinology at Ulster University. His clinical and research work focus solely on Obesity and type 2 diabetes.
Professor Miras has contributed to the clinical management and research in Obesity over the last 12 years, through his work at a high throughput Obesity Centre.
The specialist interests of his research Group are the mechanisms of action of interventions for obesity, focusing on pharmacotherapy, medical devices and obesity surgery.
Dr Dimitris Papamargaritis
-
Dr Dimitris Papamargaritis is an Associate Professor and Honorary Consultant in Diabetes and Endocrinology at University of Leicester / University Hospitals of Northamptonshire NHS Group with special interest in obesity and type 2 diabetes. He is a National Clinical Fellow of the European Association for the Study of Obesity, a trustee of the Association for the study of Obesity and a member of the academic committee of the Association of British Clinical Diabetologists. His research interests include new pharmacotherapies for obesity management, understanding how to best combine lifestyle, pharmacological and surgical treatments for obesity and type 2 diabetes as well as interventions for postprandial hypoglycaemia after bariatric surgery.