Leadership
Sheila Collins, Ph.D.
Director, Division of Translational Biology
Sheila Collins, Ph.D. is director of Translational Biology and the Program in Endocrine Biology as well as a senior investigator at The Hamner Institutes for Health Sciences, located in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. Dr. Collins' principal area of research is fat cell metabolism as it relates to diabetes and obesity. She studies why the normal metabolic processes at the cellular and tissue levels become disturbed in obese states and how adrenaline communicates to cells the need to mobilize stored fat.
Dr. Collins' research grant history includes a number of grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the March of Dimes Birth Defects Foundation, the American Diabetes Association and the American Heart Association. She has also been the recipient of various pharmaceutical research contracts and gifts.
As a faculty member in the department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences of Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, Dr. Collins was awarded tenure in 2003. (Tenure of basic science faculty in Duke University's clinical departments is unusual and considered highly meritorious.) At Duke University Medical Center from 1997 to 2004, Dr. Collins was associate professor, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, as well as Assistant Professor, Department of Pharmacology and Cancer Biology. She was also a member of the Sarah W. Stedman Center for Nutritional Studies. Dr. Collins retains her appointment at Duke in the department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. Dr. Collins taught Problems in Pharmacology, a case studies course in medical pharmacology for first-year medical school students, and she also lectures on the scientific aspects of the topics of obesity, diabetes, monoamine receptors, human nutrition, and the molecular basis of appetite. She has served on a number of faculty search committees, including the Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology, the Department of Pharmacology, and various Stedman Center appointments. Dr. Collins was on the Chancellor's Steering Committee on Obesity Research at Duke University Medical Center and was the Department of Psychiatry representative to the Duke University Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee. At present, Dr. Collins is a member of The Hamner Institutes Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee.
In recent professional activities, Dr. Collins served as session discussion chair for "Biomarkers for Toxicology Studies" at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences facility in 2006. That same year, she was chair of a special Program Project Grant Review at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases of the NIH. From 2004 to 2006, Dr. Collins was a member of the NIH External Advisory Committee, Clinical Nutrition Research Unit, at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. In 2005, she was an invited panelist at the Society's Workshop on Sex and Gender Differences in Obesity and Cardiovascular Disease, with the Society for Women's Health Research in Washington, D.C. Dr. Collins serves or has served on editorial boards for the scientific journals Molecular Endocrinology, Obesity Research, and Endocrinology, and she regularly serves in an ad hoc capacity for other journals such as Diabetes, Molecular and Cellular Biology.
Dr. Collins maintains professional society memberships in the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, the Endocrine Society, North American Association for the Study of Obesity, the American Diabetes Association and the American Society of Microbiology. As the author of numerous scientific articles and textbook chapters, Dr. Collins often presents at symposiums, professional conferences and workshops the world over. She has been interviewed by various writers for articles in The Park Guide, CIIT Activities, and Assay and Drug Development Technologies. Radio station WCOM-FM interviewed Dr. Collins on the topic of biomolecular mechanisms of metabolism.
Graduating magna cum laude, Dr. Collins earned a B.S. in zoology from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1979 and was a University of Massachusetts Commonwealth Honor Scholar - now termed Commonwealth Scholar. In 1985, she earned a Ph.D. in biology/applied biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at Cambridge. Immediately following her medical center postdoctoral training at Duke University, Dr. Collins was named a Mal Tyor Junior Faculty Scholar.