Impact
Luigi Fontana is a physician scientist whose clinical research, begun in 2001, examines how calorie intake, meal frequency, diet composition and exercise training affect metabolic and molecular health in humans. His studies of dietary restriction in people contributed to the now widely accepted view of dietary restriction as an intervention relevant to obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer and dementia, with work published in JAMA, Science, Nature and Cell. Before moving to Australia he was Full Professor of Medicine and Nutritional Sciences at Washington University in St Louis and at Brescia, Italy, and co-director of the Washington University Longevity Research Program. Since July 2018 he has held the Leonard P. Ullmann Chair of Translational Metabolic Health at the University of Sydney's Charles Perkins Centre, where he directs the Charles Perkins Centre RPA Clinic and the Health for Life program; he is also a clinical academic in endocrinology at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital. His awards include the AFAR Breakthroughs in Gerontology Award (2009), the Glenn Award (2011) and the AFAR Vincent Cristofalo Award (2016). He has edited Nutrition and Healthy Aging since 2016.
Metrics
- h-index 94 · google scholar as of 2026-09-23 source ↗
Research output
391 works · 33,824 citations · h-index 83 OpenAlex ↗
Selected publications
- Extending Healthy Life Span—From Yeast to Humans ↗ 2010 · 3,088 citations
- Diet Drives Convergence in Gut Microbiome Functions Across Mammalian Phylogeny and Within Humans ↗ 2011 · 2,067 citations
- Visceral Fat Adipokine Secretion Is Associated With Systemic Inflammation in Obese Humans ↗ 2007 · 1,425 citations
- Promoting Health and Longevity through Diet: From Model Organisms to Humans ↗ 2015 · 1,296 citations
- Low Protein Intake Is Associated with a Major Reduction in IGF-1, Cancer, and Overall Mortality in the 65 and Younger but Not Older Population ↗ 2014 · 930 citations