I was born French Canadian, in Montreal to be exact, in 1975. My family moved to San Antonio in '78, so I grew up in the good old Texas public school system while spending my summers as a kid back in Quebec (which I still do when I can). I graduated from Texas Tech University in 1997 and realized that I liked Cell Biology, so I got lucky and ended up as a Research Assistant in an insulin signalling lab that Fall, all of which led me to a doctorate in biochemistry from the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. I met my boss, Larry Mandarino, PhD, when he interviewed me for grad school and we both left UTHSCSA for Arizona State University together in 2005, him as the Chair of Kinesiology (a department that later went bye-bye), me as a Post-Doctoral Fellow. Spent too long there before taking an Assistant Professor position at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Ariz., in 2012. Realized pretty quickly that Mayo held no future for me, so we all ended up at the University of Arizona College of Medicine – Tucson in the Fall of 2016, which turned out to be where we should have started in Arizona in the first place. Love the UA, so good to be back at a health science center and an institution that has a passion for basic biomedical research.
The role of insulin is to lower blood glucose levels by stimulating glucose uptake into muscle and adipose tissue. Resistance to insulin, a phenomenon directly involved in the pathogenesis of type 2 diabetes, remains to be understood. Basic research has yet to fully discover how insulin action is elicited. Research in the laboratory of Paul R. Langlais, PhD, focuses on the identification and characterization of proteins involved in insulin signal transduction and also tests whether the dysfunction of these proteins is involved in the pathogenesis of insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. Dr. Langlais specializes in the use of mass spectrometry to perform proteomics, a technique that allows for large-scale quantitative analysis of protein abundances between different treatments. This approach led him to the discovery that CLIP-associating protein 2 (CLASP2) is responsive to insulin stimulation, and his now-published findings support the involvement of CLASP2 in insulin-stimulated glucose uptake. Current research is aimed at discovering the role of CLASP2 in insulin action, in addition to identifying new proteins previously unknown to function in this system. Dr. Langlais leads the University of Arizona College of Medicine Quantitative Proteomics Laboratory, a collaborative environment for investigators at the University of Arizona and their colleagues to perform proteomic studies in their respective projects.