Timothy H. Moran, PhD

Director of Behavioral and Biological Research
Director of the Education and Training Program (ETP)
Paul R. McHugh Professor, Vice Chair, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Johns Hopkins School of Medicine
Joint Appointments: Department of International Health, Social and Behavioral Interventions, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

Tim Moran received his BA in Psychology from Trinity College and completed his MA and PhD in Psychology at the Johns Hopkins University.  He joined the faculty in the Department of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine as the Adolf Meyer Fellow in 1984 and was promoted to professor in 1992.   He was named the inaugural Paul R. McHugh Professor of Motivated Behaviors in 1999.

Dr. Moran’s research interests are in brain/behavior relationships as they apply to the controls of food intake and body weight.  The work has focused on brain/gut peptides as feedback controls of meal size and how these interact with neural systems involved in overall energy balance and reward processing with a focus on how decisions about what and when to eat go awry in eating disorders and obesity.  Additional projects examine how gestational and early developmental factors can bias metabolic and neural programming to contribute to obesity and the effects of exercise on diet preference and overall energy balance.  Experiments are conducted at multiple levels using cell and animal models as well as normal and patient populations.

Representative Publications:

• Tamashiro, K.L.K., Terrillion, C.E., Hyun, J., Koenig, J.I. and Moran, T.H.: Prenatal stress or high fat diet increases susceptibility to diet-induced obesity in rat offspring.  Diabetes 58:1116-1125, 2009.
• Dailey, M.J., Moghadam, A.A. and Moran, T.H.: Jejunal linoleic acid infusions require GLP-1 to inhibit food intake: implications for the effectiveness of Roux-en Y gastric bypass.  American Journal of Physiology 301: E1184-E1190, 2011.
• Sun, B., Liang, N.C., Ewald, E.R., Purcell, R.H., Boersma, G.J., Yan, J., Moran, T.H. and Tamashiro, K.L.:  Early postweaning exercise improves central leptin sensitivity in offspring of rat dams fed high-fat diet during pregnancy and lactation.   American Journal of Physiology, 305: R1076-R1084, 2013.
• Treesukosol, Y., Sun, B., Moghadam, A., Liang, N.C., Tamashiro, K.L. and Moran, T.H.:  Maternal high-fat diet during pregnancy and lactation reduces the appetitive behavioral component in female offspring tested in a brief-access taste procedure. American Journal of Physiology, 306:R499-R509, 2014. 
• Yang, Y., Moghadam, A.A., Cordner, Z., Liang, N-C. and Moran, T.H.:  Long term exendin-4 treatment reduces food intake and body weight and alters expression of brain homeostatic and reward markers.  Endocrinology, 155: 3473-3483, 2014. 

For a full publications list see here.