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Denise Belsham, PhD (she/her/hers)

Professor/Scientist
University of Toronto
Toronto, ON, Canada

Professor Denise Belsham, PhD, is an award-winning educator and researcher in the Department of Physiology and Medicine at the University of Toronto. She holds a Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Neuroendocrinology. She has over 30 years of neuroendocrine research in obesity, circadian rhythms, and reproduction. The focus of her laboratory is to understand, at the molecular level, how the brain achieves its diverse physiological functions. She developed an array of over 300 clonal neuronal cell models from the hypothalamus, now in over 600 labs worldwide, and started a biotech company to distribute the lines, CELLutions Biosystems. She has recently founded a second biotech company ZAPetite Inc to bring her novel discovery of a natural bio-identical therapeutic for obesity and metabolic disease to the market. She was the founding and initial President of the Pan American Neuroendocrine Society. She is now the first female President of the International Neuroendocrine Federation (2024-2028), the governing body of the global neuroendocrine community.

Dr Denise Belsham was named one of the Top100 Most Powerful Women in Canada by the Women’s Executive Network in 2025. She was awarded the prestigious President’s Teaching Award in 2023 at the University of Toronto for innovative teaching and course/program development, including a novel course on Commercialization in Physiology, a key component of a Professional MHSc in Medical Physiology that she envisioned and launched. She also won the “Sustained Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Excellence” in 2019 and the “Excellence in Linking Undergraduate Teaching to Research in Life Sciences Award” in 2020 from the Faculty of Medicine for her contributions towards the careers of the over 170 trainees from her laboratory. She received her PhD in Human Genetics and Biochemistry from the University of Manitoba and was an MRC-funded post-doctoral fellow at the University of California, San Diego.

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