Patrick Schrauwen, Professor of Metabolic Aspects of Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus, was born on April 4th 1971 in Hoogerheide, The Netherlands. He started his study health sciences in 1989, with speciality movement sciences at the Maastricht University, where he graduated in 1994. In the same year, he started his PhD at the department of Human Biology of the Maastricht University.

In 1997 he received a travel grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) for an eight months visit at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Phoenix (USA), to study molecular and genetic aspects of obesity and type 2 diabetes mellitus, under supervision of Prof. Dr. Eric Ravussin. In 1998 Prof. Dr. Schrauwen received his PhD at the Maastricht University for his thesis "Determinants of energy and substrate metabolism" for which he was awarded with the "NWO-Foppe ten Hoor Young investigator award" in 1998. In 1999 he was appointed a post-doc fellowship by NWO to examine the role of uncoupling proteins in human energy and substrate metabolism. For this work he won the Young Investigators Award for clinical science from the European Association for the Study of Obesity in 2001. In 2006 he won the 'Silver Medal Award' of the ‘Nutrition Society’, which is awarded annually since 1991 to researchers below 40 years for scientific achievements in the field of nutrition, and in 2008 he received the ‘Rising Star Award’ from the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD). Prof. Schrauwen is associate editor of the journals ‘Applied Physiology, Nutrition and Metabolism' and 'Nutrition and Diabetes'.

In 2008 Prof. Schrauwen received the prestigious VICI-fellowship from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO/ZonMW). His main fields of interest in research concern muscular insulin resistance, lipotoxicity and mitochondrial dysfunction with special emphasis on type 2 diabetes mellitus.

The research team supervised by Prof. Schrauwen investigates whole-body, tissue and cellular physiology. To this end, molecular, genetic and whole-body techniques are used in both rodent and human models. In collaboration with the department of Radiology of the Maastricht University Hospital, Prof. Schrauwen applies non-invasive magnetic resonance spectroscopy to investigate in vivo mitochondrial function and lipid accumulation in muscle, liver and heart.