John Miller, professor of physics, recently received a three-year, $623,000 exploratory research grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in a joint program with the National Science Foundation (NSF) on biosensors for energy balance and obesity.

Miller is also the director of the High-Temperature Superconducting Device Applications and Nano-Biophysics Laboratory at the Texas Center for Superconductivity at the University of Houston (TcSUH).

His collaborators include Willam Widger, professor of biology and biochemistry at UH, and two endocrinologists at Methodist Hospital.

The group is targeting metabolic syndrome, a pernicious complication of obesity that affects 20 percent of obese individuals and greatly increases the likelihood of diabetes, heart disease and cancer. Their long-term goal is to develop innovative technologies that detect metabolic activity for research and clinical applications.

“Although drug treatments for metabolic syndrome exist, the cost of the drugs to treat all obese individuals is prohibitive,” Miller said. “Therefore, there is a critical public health need to develop technologies that can provide early diagnosis of metabolic syndrome and enable cost-effective treatment, as well as to measure metabolic activity and other components of energy balance in obese patients.”