Rate My Professor Keith Frayn

Professor Keith Frayn is an Emeritus Fellow of Green Templeton College and Emeritus Professor of Human Metabolism at the University of Oxford in the Faculty of Medicine. His research has focused on human metabolism and nutrition, particularly the interface between these fields, human fat metabolism, and adipose tissue physiology. Frayn began his interest in human fat metabolism while working in the Medical Research Council’s Trauma Unit, studying metabolic changes in critically ill patients. He joined Green College (now Green Templeton College) in 1996 to take up a Mars Research Fellowship in Nutrition, beginning a long association with the college that has included collaborations such as with Professor Derek Jewell in Gastroenterology.

Frayn is the author of the textbook Human Metabolism: a Regulatory Perspective (4th edition, with R.D. Evans, Wiley, 2019) and the book A Calorie is a Calorie: The Inescapable Science that Controls Our Body Weight (Hachette, 2025). He has received the British Nutrition Society’s Blaxter Award for lifetime achievement in whole body metabolism and animal nutrition, the British Nutrition Foundation prize in 2014, and was made an Honorary Fellow of the British Nutrition Foundation in 2016. He has delivered lectures including one on ‘Turning over our fat stores: the key to metabolic health’ upon receiving the Blaxter Award and chaired the launch of a British Nutrition Foundation Task Force report on cardiovascular disease.