Professor Mone Zaidi, MBBS, PhD, MD, FRCP, FRCPI, FRCPath, MACP, MD (h.c.), DSc (h.c.)Mone Zaidi graduated in medicine from King George’s Medical College, India, and trained clinically at the Hammersmith Hospital, London, under the tutelage of Professor Iain MacIntyre, FRS, who discovered calcitonin. After obtaining a PhD and MD from the University of London, Dr. Zaidi held appointments as Lecturer at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School and Senior Lecturer and Consultant at St. George’s Hospital Medical School for over 8 years. In 1999, he was recruited to Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York as Professor of Medicine and Founding Director of The Mount Sinai Bone Program. Zaidi has made groundbreaking discoveries on the mechanisms of skeletal homeostasis in health and its dysregulation in common and rare diseases. These studies, spanning over 30 years, included the first description of calcium sensing in the osteoclast and the discovery that locally released nitric oxide acts to suppress bone cells. In 2003, Zaidi’s group published the first evidence for a pituitary–bone axis of medical significance, a breakthrough in physiology in which pituitary hormones could affect the skeleton directly. In a recent groundbreaking paper in Nature, he found that inhibiting FSH not only increased bone mass, but also reduced body fat–in essence, laying a firm foundation for a single anti-FSH agent to treat both osteoporosis and obesity. This corpus of work was selected by Nature Medicine as one of eight “Notable Advances in biomedicine for 2017, and was editorialized widely in the scientific and lay press, including New York Times. Constituting a total of over 409 publications in quality journals, including Cell, Nature and PNAS, Zaidi’s research has been funded continuously by the U.S. National Institutes of Health. He has been bestowed upon by many honors, such as his election to the Association of American Physicians, the Interurban Clinical Club (established by Sir William Osler in 1905) of which he is President, the Practitioners’ Society (the oldest medical society in the U.S.) and the Association of Professors of Medicine. Zaidi was made Master of the American College of Physicians, received the Harrington Scholar–Innovator Award, was elected as Fellow of the American Association of Advancement of Science, and is recipient of three honorary doctorates.
