Work Summary
The role of insulin is to lower blood glucose levels by stimulating glucose uptake into muscle and adipose tissue. Resistance to insulin, a phenomenon directly involved in the pathogenesis of type 2 diabetes, is not fully understood. Basic research has yet to discover how insulin action is elicited at the subcellular level. Research in the laboratory of Paul R. Langlais, PhD, focuses on the identification and characterization of proteins involved in insulin-stimulated biology and also tests whether the dysfunction of these proteins is involved in the pathogenesis of insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. Dr. Langlais is also Director of the UAHS Quantitative Proteomics Laboratory, a resource he developed with Dr. Lawrence Mandarino to collaborate with other faculty on projects interested in taking advantage of mass spectrometry to perform proteome-wide hypothesis-testing experiments.
Research Interest
Dr. Langlais graduated from Texas Tech University in 1997 with the realization that he enjoyed his Cell Biology class, so he got lucky and ended up as a Research Assistant in an insulin signaling lab that Fall, all of which led to a PhD in biochemistry from the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. Dr. Langlais met his boss, Dr. Lawrence Mandarino, when he interviewed for grad school and they both left UTHSCSA for Arizona State University together in 2005, Dr. Mandarino as the Chair of Kinesiology, Dr. Langlais as a Post-Doctoral Fellow. Spent too long there before taking an Assistant Professor position at the Mayo Clinic in Arizona in 2012 and shortly after had the excellent fortune of obtaining an NIH R01 grant. Dr. Langlais joined the Endocrinology Division in the Department of Medicine at the University of Arizona College of Medicine in the Fall of 2016. Dr. Langlais has enjoyed his time at the UA, so good to be back at a health science center and an institution that has a passion for basic biomedical research. Dr. Langlais is also a member of the Physiological Sciences Graduate Interdisciplinary Program at the UA.
Dr. Langlais started his career as a scientist in an era where radiation was the main approach to study protein phosphorylation. Luckily he met the right people and got an early introduction to mass spectrometry. As a result, his training incorporated basic molecular biology, traditional signaling techniques, microscopy, and eventually mass spectrometry and proteomics. During this scientific journey, he became self-proficient as an end user capable of running mass spectrometers to study proteins. This led to a lot of collaboration, so much so, that together with Dr. Lawrence Mandarino, they developed numerous proteomics facilities, all of which cumulated to create the University of Arizona College of Medicine Quantitative Proteomics Laboratory, a collaborative resource designed to offer UA investigators a chance to use quantitative proteomics to answer their own personal research questions, of which Dr. Langlais is the Director.
