Evan R. Simpson, Ph.D., F.A.A.

 

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The role of estrogens in brain functions and physiology and the use of exogenous estrogens in postmenopausal women remain areas of intense investigation. In this issue, Dr. Evan R. Simpson, a member of the editorial board of Seminars in Reproductive Medicine, has brought together a group of outstanding investigators to readdress this important issue.

Dr. Evan Simpson is a native of Edinburgh, Scotland, and received his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Edinburgh. He was a lecturer in the Department of Physics as Applied to Medicine at the Middlesex Hospital Medical School in London, and from 1977 to 1997 he was a faculty member at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, Texas, beginning as an assistant professor and rising to the rank of professor of biochemistry and obstetrics and gynecology. From 1985 to 1997, he was associate director of the Cecil H. and Ida Green Center for Reproductive Biology Sciences at Southwestern. Dr. Simpson served as my research mentor during my fellowship and later as a research colleague and friend. We collaborated and published a number of articles together until he left in 1997. In 1997, he was recruited to the Prince Henry's Institute of Medical Research at the Monash Medical Centre in Melbourne, Australia, where he was appointed director. He has had a long interest in the basic biology of estrogen biosynthesis, especially its relationship to breast cancer. His group was the first to clone and characterize the aromatase gene and to show the unique use of tissue-specific promoters to regulate tissue-specific expression of the gene. This led in turn to the concept of breast-specific inhibitors of aromatase expression as a novel therapeutic modality for breast cancer in postmenopausal women, which would spare estrogen formation in other sites such as bone and brain. His group's development of the aromatase knockout mouse, as a model of estrogen deficiency, provided insights into the role of estrogens in the physiology and pathophysiology of both males and females and revealed many unexpected roles for estrogen unrelated to sexual differentiation. It was subsequently found that many of these actions were replicated in humans with natural inactivating mutations in the aromatase gene. More recently, his group is working to understand the molecular mechanisms underlying the relationship between obesity, aging, and breast cancer. He is a council member of several endocrine societies and has been an invited lecturer at numerous symposia and medical centers internationally. He has published more than 360 articles in peer-reviewed journals and has contributed some 70 book chapters. He has also received significant scientific recognition including The President's Scientific Achievement Award from the Society for Gynecologic Investigation (USA), the Roy Greep Award from the US Endocrine Society, the Transatlantic and Oceana-Pacific Medals from the UK Society of Endocrinology, and the Komen Brinker Award from the Susan Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.