Investigations in the Banks lab focus on understanding the mechanisms linking obesity with insulin resistance. The goal of this work is to provide new insights that may lead to novel therapeutic interventions. Approaches used in their work include pharmacologic and genetic approaches in mice and in human cells to mechanistically model aspects of metabolic disease.

Dr. Banks received his PhD from Columbia University, and performed postdoctoral fellowships at Columbia University and also at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Banks is currently an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in the Division of Endocrinology. He is the director of the Energy Balance Core Facility. He serves as chairman of the International Indirect Calorimetry Consensus Committee, a group dedicated to establishing standards for analysis methods that promote greater portability, transparency, and reproducibility in metabolic research.

Their group has also developed software for the analysis of indirect calorimetry and energy balance experiments. This free program, CalR, has been used to analyze more than 90,000 experiments worldwide and has established new global standards for the field.