John Speakman holds a personal chair at the Institute of Biological  and Environmental Sciences at the University of Aberdeen (Scotland, UK), and is a ‘1000 talents’ professor at the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing (China).

His work focuses on the causes and consequences of variation in energy balance, and in particular the factors that limit expenditure, the genetic and environmental drivers of obesity and the energetic contribution to ageing. He is an internationally recognised expert in the use of isotope methodologies to measure energy demands and has used these methods on a wide range of wild animals, model species and humans.

He is a Royal Society-Wolfson Research Merit Award holder (2016-date), and is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (elected 2004), the Academy of medical sciences (2008), Academia Europeae (2011), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2017). He was awarded the Zoological Society of London Science medal (1995), the Scottish Science medal (2002) and was the first Briton ever to be awarded the Chinese Academy of Sciences prize for international collaboration (2016).