Current work and interests
Professor Ken Ong co-leads the Unit’s Early Life Aetiology and Mechanisms of Diabetes and Related Metabolic Disorders programme with Dr John Perry. His research in the Unit and at the Department of Paediatrics, University of Cambridge identified rapid postnatal growth, weight gain and early reproductive timing as determinants of, and also potential targets for the prevention of, childhood obesity, type 2 diabetes and related disorders. His programme studies the mechanisms that underlie these developmental trajectories to disease risk. He works closely with the Unit’s other research programmes in the aetiology of diabetes and related metabolic disorders and in the development and testing of behavioural interventions to prevent childhood obesity.