Dr. Christoph Buettner is Chief of the Division of Endocrinology, Metabolism and Nutrition and Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Medicine at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. He is a physician–scientist and endocrinologist internationally recognized for his work on the neuroendocrine regulation of metabolism and the mechanisms linking obesity, stress, aging, and insulin resistance.

Dr. Buettner received his MD and PhD from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He subsequently completed postdoctoral training at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, followed by residency training in Internal Medicine at NYU Langone Health and fellowship training in Endocrinology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where he transitioned into metabolism research. He later established his independent laboratory at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where he rose through the academic ranks to become a tenured Professor before joining Rutgers in 2020.

His research program focuses on how the brain and sympathetic nervous system regulate adipose tissue biology, liver metabolism, and insulin action. His laboratory combines integrated physiology approaches—including hyperinsulinemic-euglycemic clamps, indirect calorimetry, metabolomics, continuous glucose monitoring, and wearable physiology—with genetic mouse models and molecular studies of signaling and transcriptional regulation.

Dr. Buettner’s laboratory recently demonstrated that early overnutrition-induced insulin resistance occurs despite preserved insulin receptor signaling and is instead initiated by increased sympathetic nervous system activity, adipose tissue lipolysis, and fatty acid spillover, fundamentally revising prevailing concepts of insulin resistance pathogenesis. His group is now translating these discoveries into human physiology studies aimed at understanding how psychosocial stress, aging, and overnutrition interact to drive reversible metabolic dysfunction.

In addition to his basic and translational research efforts, Dr. Buettner oversees the Mouse Metabolic Phenotyping Core at Rutgers and has developed multidisciplinary collaborations integrating clinical research, wearable sensing technologies, metabolomics, and machine learning approaches for digital biomarker development. His work aims to develop scalable approaches to predict, prevent, and treat obesity, diabetes, and related neurodegenerative and cardiometabolic diseases.

Dr. Buettner is an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the Association of American Physicians.