Frankie Heyward, Ph.D.

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Frankie Heyward, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Internal Medicine at UT Southwestern Medical Center and a member of the Center for Hypothalamic Research. Dr. Heyward holds a secondary appointment as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Neuroscience.

Dr. Heyward earned a bachelor's in biology and psychology from the University of Delaware. He received his doctorate in neurobiology from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and completed postdoctoral research training through joint fellowships in endocrinology, diabetes and metabolism at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He became an Instructor at Harvard Medical School and BIDMC in 2023. 

Dr. Heyward joined the faculty of UT Southwestern in 2023. He is also the active Founding Chair of the National Black Postdoctoral Association (501c3) and was the Founding Chair of the Harvard Medical School Black Postdoctoral Association (HBPA).

The Heyward Lab studies how neurotoxic insults from an obesogenic diet and aging contribute to epigenetically encoded impairments in brain cell types that control hunger and body weight. Investigations involve single-cell and bulk cell-type-specific assessments of gene expression, epigenetic landscapes, and transcription factor DNA binding dynamics, as well as the application of mouse genetic and epigenome engineering tools and behavioral assessments.