SPEAKERS ARDD 2022
Leaders in the aging and longevity field will describe the latest progress in the molecular, cellular and organismal basis of aging and our search for interventions.
Judith Campisi
Buck Institute, USA
Judith Campisi received a PhD in biochemistry from the State University of New York Stony Brook, and postdoctoral training in cancer biology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. In 1984, she joined the Boston University Medical School faculty as Assistant and then Associate Professor. She joined the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as Senior Scientist in 1991. In 2002, she started a second laboratory at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, where she is Professor.
At both institutions, Campisi established a broad program to understand the relationship between aging and disease, with an emphasis on the role of cellular senescence in promoting inflammation, cancer and degenerative diseases. Her laboratory made several pioneering discoveries in these areas, has several long-standing national and international collaborations, and mentors many students and fellows. Her research continues to challenge and alter existing paradigms.
Campisi had received numerous awards, including MERIT awards from the National Institute on Aging, and awards from the AlliedSignal Corporation, Gerontological Society of America and American Federation for Aging Research, the Longevity prize from the IPSEN Foundation, and the first international Olav Thon Foundation prize. She is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Association for Cancer Research, and the National Academy of Sciences. She serves on numerous national and international editorial and scientific advisory boards.
Johan Auwerx
Professor at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland
Dr. Auwerx is trained as a physician scientist and has extensive research expertise and experience in cellular and molecular physiology, metabolism, and genetics developed in C. elegans, mice, and humans. He has been using systems approaches to map the signaling networks that coordinate the communication between the nucleus and the mitochondria and as such regulate organismal metabolism in health, aging, and disease. Although his research has addressed basic biomedical questions, his medical background facilitated the translation of this research into novel preventive and therapeutic strategies for common age-related diseases, such as type 2 diabetes, obesity, atherosclerosis, and frailty, as well as for rare inherited mitochondrial diseases. The translational value of his work is testified by the fact that several drugs targeting processes and pathways, which he elucidated are currently used in the clinic.
Michael A. Petr
Tracked.bio
Michael Petr has a B.S. in biomedical engineering, previously interned in biotech/pharma companies, and was a research fellow at the National Institute on Aging, NIH, in Rafael de Cabo's lab. He earned his PhD from University of Copenhagen in Morten Scheibye-Knudsen's lab. He is currently a postdoc and spearheading the spinout company Tracked.bio. Michael has an interest in accelerating drug discovery in aging research via automation.
Nir Barzilai
Albert Einstein College of Medicine, USA
Dr. Nir Barzilai is the founding director of the Institute for Aging Research, the Nathan Shock Center of Excellence in the Basic Biology of Aging and the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Human Aging Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University (Einstein). He also directs the Longevity Genes Project, a genetics study of over 600 families of centenarians and their children. The participants are all Ashkenazi Jews, a group selected for their genetic homogeneity, which makes it easier to identify significant genetic variations. Dr. Barzilai found that many of the centenarians had very high levels of HDL, or the "good cholesterol." Dr. Barzilai is also co-founder of CohBar, Inc., a biotechnology company developing mitochondria based therapeutics to treat diseases associated with aging.

Dr. Barzilai discovered several "longevity genes" in humans that were validated by others. These include variants in genes involved in cholesterol metabolism (CETP and APOC3), metabolism (ADIPOQ and TSHR) and growth (IGF1R). These genes appear to protect centenarians against major age-related diseases, such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, type 2 diabetes and dementia.
Joe Betts-LaCroix
Co-Founder, CEO, Retro Biosciences
Joe Betts-LaCroix began as a scientist at Harvard, MIT, and Caltech. He was part of a three-person team at Caltech that first elucidated the factors governing electron-tunneling rates in proteins, which is published in journals such as Science and JACS, with over 1000 citations so far. His first venture-funded startup, OQO, created the world's smallest windows computer (Guinness world record 2006) with a team of 110 people, more than 100 patents, and over 10,000 units sold; and was sold to Google. His second startup, Vium, automated animal research to accelerate medical research. Vium, as a team of 75 people, created thousands of advanced mouse cages that monitor environmental factors and HD video in each cage using computer vision + deep neural networks to determine whether experimental drugs are working against models of disease. Recursion Pharma acquired Vium in 2020 and IPO'd in 2021. Joe spent 2.5 years as a part-time partner at Y Combinator and has mentored and invested in numerous bio startups. Joe is presently CEO of his third venture-funded startup, Retro Biosciences, which is creating therapeutics against targets elucidated by its research in aging biology, with the mission of increasing healthy human lifespan by ten years.
Alexandra Bause
Apollo Health Ventures, USA
Alexandra is a co-founder and investment director at Apollo Health Ventures, a biotech company builder and investment fund focused on targeting chronic age-related diseases. At Apollo, Alexandra is leading the venture creation programs, while also managing the pipeline and diligence process for external investment opportunities, predominantly focusing on preclinical stage biotech companies. Before joining Apollo, Alexandra worked with The Boston Consulting Group where she specialized in biopharma strategy. Alexandra is a trained pharmacist, and focused on investigating the molecular mechanisms that contribute to cellular aging during her PhD studies in biomedical sciences and pharmacology at Harvard Medical School.
Evelyne Bischof
Shanghai University of Medicine and Health Sciences, China
Prof. Evelyne Yehudit Bischof (prev. Ewelina Biskup), MD, MPH, FEFIM, FMH
Affiliated with the Shanghai University of Medicine and Health Sciences
Longevity physician at Human Longevity Inc.
Chief physician associate at University Hospital Renji of Jiaotong University Shanghai, prev. attending physician at the University Hospital Basel. Specialist in internal medicine, with research focus on longevity medicine, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and digital health, precision medicine, biogerontology, and geronto-oncology. Trained a.e. at Harvard Medical School affiliated hospitals (Mass General Hospital,
Beth Israel MD, Dana Farber) and Columbia University NYC, graduated from Dresden Medical School (Germany), Swiss board certified after residency and fellowship at the University Hospitals of Zurich and Basel (Switzerland).
Published over 80 peer-reviewed papers, frequent speaker at scientific and medical conferences in Asia and Europe. Long term member of various medical societies, e.g. European Federation of Internal Medicine, World Academy of Medical Sciences, Swiss Society of Internal Medicine etcc.
Spent a decade practicing medicine, lecturing at medical schools and performing clinical and translational research in New York, Shanghai and Basel, with extensive experience in scientific research and clinical practice at the following well-known and highly reputable institutions: University Hospital of Basel, Fudan Cancer Institute and Hospital; Zhongshan Hospital, Renji Hospital and Shanghai East
Hospital
Vilhelm Bohr
Chief of the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics, the National Institute on Aging (NIA)
Dr.Bohr's early professional training took place at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, where he earned an M.D. in 1978, and both Ph.D. and D.Sc. degrees in 1987. After training in neurology and infectious diseases at the University Hospital in Copenhagen, he undertook postdoctoral studies in Biochemistry in the laboratory of Dr. Hans Klenow at the University of Copenhagen. Dr. Bohr developed this interest further when he held a Visiting Scholar position in the laboratory of Dr. Philip Hanawalt at Stanford University from 1982-1986. In 1986, he obtained a Junior Investigator appointment at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), and advanced to a tenured Senior Investigator appointment in 1988. In 1992, he was appointed Chief of the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics at the National Institute on Aging (NIA). Early in his career, Vilhelm developed a widely-used method for studying DNA repair in the transcribed portion of the genome and found that transcriptionally-active genes are preferentially repaired through a process now known as transcription-coupled nucleotide excision repair (TC-NER). In recent studies, Dr.Bohr has made seminal findings about the relationships between DNA damage, DNA repair capacity and aging-associated neurodegeneration, and has proposed important models describing crosstalk between the nuclear and mitochondrial genomes, as well as the importance of energy homeostasis/imbalance and mitochondrial dysfunction in aging-related neurodegenerative disease. Dr.Bohr discovered that NAD level was lower in diseases with deficient DNA repair leading to mitochondrial dysfunction. Intervention with NAD supplementation has shown excellent benefits in mice and other model systems of neurodegeneration and DNA repair deficits including Alzheimers disease.
Ann Beliën
CEO and Founder Rejuvenate Biomed
Ann Beliën founded Rejuvenate Biomed in 2017 and under her leadership the company evolved from a discovery company to a preclinical stage, and recently to a clinic stage company. Ann has over 20 years of experience in drug development from bench to market, which she acquired at Johnson & Johnson throughout multiple international assignments (US, NL, BE). She developed from scientist to operational and strategic roles (oncology, neurology, infectious diseases, vaccines, inflammation) including external & open innovation and BD roles (therapeutics and prevention). She joined Johnson & Johnson in 2000, after a postdoc at ETH, Zurich, Switzerland. She holds a PhD in Neuro-oncology from the University of Irchel, Zurich, Switzerland and a master's degree in Biomedical Research Sciences from the Free University of Brussels (VUB), Belgium.
Martin Borch Jensen
Gordian Biotechnology, USA
Martin Borch Jensen is founder and CSO of Gordian Biotechnology, which is developing therapeutics for age-related disease by enabling high-throughput testing in the model relevant models using a platform that allows hundreds of therapies to be tested in a single animal. He is also president of the non-profit Norn Group, running programs to accelerate aging research and development. These include the Longevity Impetus Grants, which gave away >$20M in 2021, the Longevity Apprenticeship, which trains leaders in the longevity field, and most recently the immigration program Talent Bridge. His prior academic career included a PhD at the NIH National Institute on Aging as a Danish Elite Research Travel Scholar, postdoctoral research on longevity pathways at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, and a K99 Pathway to Independence award to study inter-organ signaling in aging.
Michael Ben Ezra
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Joanna Bensz
Founder and CEO, Longevity Center, Europe
Longevity Center is part of the Longevity Group SA, an investment company based in Luxemburg creating an ecosystem of solutions in the area of longevity. The company specializes on practical applications and solutions in wellness and developed longevity diagnostics protocols, programs, treatments, nutritional and training plans and products that support vitality and healthy longevity.
Joanna is one of the precursors in developing pathways of modern prevention in longevity-based healthcare in Europe.
Entrepreneur with many years of experience in managing and developing the business of international companies, including Fortune 500 across Central and Eastern Europe.
After many years in corporate structures, she decided to follow her passion and build her own business path at the crossroad between healthcare, human potential and performance. She is interested in influences on vitality and creativity.
At the end of 2019, together with Prince Michael von Liechtenstein, she opened the first boutique Longevity Center which integrates scientific knowledge with hands on preventive and personalized medicine experience. In January 2022 the company opened another one in Germany at the five-star hotel The Öschberghof. The company is planning
to grow a network of centers across Europe in the next 5 years.
The centers are focusing on personalized interventions based on in-depth diagnostics, epigenetics and biomarkers of biological age.
As a co-founder of the International Institute of Longevity and Chairwoman of the Longevity Vaduz Roundtable, she promotes knowledge about the sector by working with international experts in the field of age sciences, health prevention and longevity economics.
Olga Bielska
Buck Institute for Research on Aging, California, USA
Dr. Bielska is a postdoc at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, California, USA. Born and raised in Donetsk, Ukraine, Olga Bielska received her BSc from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Ukraine. She obtained her MSc from the TU Dresden, Germany and carried out her thesis work at the University of Florida, USA. Dr. Bielska received her PhD from the University of Strasbourg, France. Her passion for mitochondrial biology and aging brought her to the lab of Dr. Verdin. At the Buck, she studies how loss of key mitochondrial fission protein, the levels of which naturally decline in tissues of humans and mice, affects aging process in mice.
Sebastian A. Brunemeier
General Partner at Healthspan Capital, Advisor to Molecule AG and VitaDAO
Sebastian A. Brunemeier is a biotech VC and company builder focused on longevity & regenerative medicine. He is Co-Founder and General Partner of Healthspan Capital. He is CEO and Founder of ImmuneAGE Pharma (stealth), focused on immune system rejuvenation. He was Co-Founder and Chief Investment Officer at Cambrian Biopharma, Co-Founder and COO of Samsara Therapeutics, and Principal at Apollo Health Ventures (the first and largest aging-focused venture capital fund in the world with $200M AUM). Altogether, these organizations have raised ±$400M in the last 4 years. He was a Fulbright Fellow on the biology of aging, a Skaggs-Oxford Scholar at the Scripps Research Institute, and a SENS Foundation Scholar at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. His education includes partial DPhil (PhD) training in biochemistry of aging at the University of Oxford as a Clarendon Scholar, a Master's in Life Science Business Management and Molecular Neuroscience from the University of Amsterdam as an Amsterdam Excellence Scholar. He served as trustee of the British Society for Research on Aging, a mentor at The New York Academy of Sciences, and as an advisor or board member to: VitaDAO/Molecule.to, Equator Therapeutics, Revivo Therapeutics, Shift Biosciences, Deciduous Therapeutics, and McKinsey & Company.
Rafael de Cabo
NIA-NIH, USA
Carles Canto
Nestlé Institute of Health Sciences, Lausanne
Carles Canto did his PhD at the University of Barcelona, focusing on the regulation of skeletal muscle metabolism in response to muscle contraction and in situations of insulin resistance. He then later moved to the Institute de Génétique et de Biologie Moléculaire et Cellulaire (IGBMC; Strasbourg) and the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL; Lausanne) to perform post-doctoral studies in the regulation of metabolic sensing enzymes, such as the AMP-activated protein kinase and sirtuins. This led to unveiling multiple interactions between these enzyme families in the regulation of mitochondrial and fatty acid oxidation-related genes expression. It also spurred an interest in NAD+ metabolism as a critical metabolite regulating cellular metabolism and transcriptional activities. During the last ten years, he has led the metabolic sensing and adaptation laboratory at the Nestlé Institute of Health Sciences (Lausanne), working on mitochondrial dynamics and NAD+ metabolism.
Nathan Cheng
Program Director, On Deck Longevity Biotech, Canada
Kaare Christensen
Danish Aging Research Center and the Danish Twin Registry
Kaare Christensen, MD, PhD, DMSc
Dr. Christensen is the Director of the Danish Aging Research Center and the Danish Twin Registry, and he is engaged in research on human development and aging combining methods from epidemiology, genetics, medicine, and demography. He has been heading a long series of studies on twins and the oldest old in order to shed light on the importance of genes and environment in aging and longevity.
Dr. Christensen is a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters and has received a series of national and international honors and awards including the Knight of the Order of Dannebrog; the University of Southern Denmark first Outreach Award for widespread and creative communication of science, and, on behalf of the Danish Twin Registry, he has received the Ethical Merit Award granted by the Danish National Committee on Biomedical Research Ethics.
Stuart Cook
Duke-NUS Medical School, Singapore
Dr Cook grew up in Kenya and studied medicine in London. He did a PhD at the National Heart and Lung Institute, UK, a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard and is a board-certified cardiologist. He is a Group Head at the MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences and Professor at Imperial College, London and Duke-National University of Singapore (Duke-NUS). He was the founding Director of the National Heart Research Institute Singapore and served as Program Director of the CVMD program at Duke-NUS. His group identified IL11 as a pro-fibrotic factor and showed a key role of IL11 in a range of human diseases. He co-founded Enleofen, a biotechnology company developing anti-fibrotic therapies that partnered with Boehringer Ingelheim. His team is focused on identifying new therapeutic targets for fibro-inflammation and for extending healthspan.
Stephanie Dainow
Executive Director at Lifespan.io
Stephanie Dainow is Executive Director at Lifespan.io [Lifespan Extension Advocacy Foundation], a US based non-profit accelerating biomedical technologies that will increase healthy human lifespan through responsible journalism, research funding, advocacy, education and decentralizing aging research. She is also a Business Mentor to SOSV's IndieBio venture fund and accelerator, consulting deep tech startup founders on business development and strategy, fundraising and executive leadership.
Previously, Stephanie was with Singularity University in Silicon Valley working across their Innovation Consultancy, Emerging Tech Think Tank, University for the Future, and Impact-based Startup Incubator. She also worked for a global management consultancy as a Life Sciences Business Manager and served as Account Director for BioMarin Pharmaceutical. Her early career in NYC spanned global growth for Interpublic Group's media arm, celebrity and brand marketing, and commercial entertainment.
Stephanie has volunteered around the world and previously held an Advisory Board position at a 501c3 that inspires Harlem youth to pursue STEM careers. She is passionate about empowering leaders to think differently about emerging technologies, disruption, and the future of business.
Joris Deelen
Research Group Leader
Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing
Joris Deelen obtained his PhD at the Leiden University Medical Center in The Netherlands in 2014. In 2016, he joined the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing as a postdoctoral researcher where he was promoted to Research Group Leader in 2020. The work in his group focusses on the establishment of novel human aging studies in Cologne to determine the efficacy of previously identified biomarkers of aging in clinical studies. The main focus is on biomarkers that have been identified in large-scale international collaborations of human studies using omics-based approaches, such as metabolomics. Moreover, his group studies the functional effect of common genetic variants (identified using large-scale genetic association studies of healthy aging) and rare protein-altering genetic variants (identified using sequencing data of long-lived individuals). To this end, they make use of the CRISPR/Cas9 system to generate transgenic cell lines and model organisms harbouring the identified variants and subsequently measure their functional effects in vitro and in vivo.
Vishwa Deep Dixit
Waldemar Von Zedtwitz Professor of Pathology, Comparative Medicine and of Immunobiology
Director, Yale Center for Research on Aging
Member, Yale Center for Molecular and Systems Metabolism
Yale School of Medicine, USA
Son of teachers, Deep grew up in Hisar (Northwest India). He studied Veterinary Medicine in India, did PhD Research in University of Hannover Germany and postdoc research in Morehouse School of Medicine and NIH. He currently holds Waldemar Von Zedtwitz endowed chair and is a Professor in the Departments of Pathology, Comparative Medicine and Immunobiology and is the director of Yale Center for Research on Aging at the Yale School of Medicine. Dixit lab studies Immunometabolism and aging. His team help establish NLRP3 inflammasome as a key mechanism of 'inflammaging' and immunosenescence that leads to age-related chronic diseases including metabolic dysfunction. Dixit and his collaborators have identified that switch from glycolysis to ketogenesis deactivates the inflammasome and reduces immunopathology. The ongoing work in his laboratory is aimed at understanding how adaptation to negative energy balance in a host can be harnessed to identify immunometabolic checkpoints to enhance health and lifespan.
Marсo Demaria
ERIBA, The Netherlands
Marco Demaria obtained his PhD at the University of Torino, Italy, studying the role of the transcription factor STAT3 as a master regulator of cancer cell survival and metabolism. He joined the laboratory of prof. Judith Campisi at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, California USA, in the summer of 2010 to navigate through the complex phenotypes of senescent cells. He also started to be interested in therapeutic approaches to target the negative aspect of senescent cells. He joined the University of Groningen and the European Research Institute for the Biology of Aging (ERIBA) in September 2015 as an Assistant Professor and Group leader of the laboratory "Cellular Senescence and Age-related Pathologies". His research is focused towards understanding the cell non-autonomous functions of senescent cells, including their roles in tissue repair, cancer and aging. The goal of his research group is to dissect positive and negative roles of cellular senescence in different physiological and pathological context. His laboratory is funded by several intramural and extramural agencies. In 2018 he co-founded a start-up company, Cleara Biotech, devoted to develop anti-senescence drugs. Dr Demaria also serves as academic editor for Aging Cell and Plos One.
Fabio Demontis
St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, USA
Dr. Fabio Demontis received his PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden (Germany) and conducted his postdoctoral research at Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA, USA. Since 2013, F.D. is a principal investigator at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, TN, USA and he is currently an Associate Member. His research focuses on the role of protein quality control in aging and age-related diseases in skeletal muscle and the central nervous system, and on how signaling factors secreted by skeletal muscle (myokines) regulate brain function and proteostasis during aging. Dr. Demontis's lab employs the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, cell culture, and mouse models for these studies. His goal is to extend healthy lifespan in humans by dissecting the role of muscle-to-brain signaling and cell-autonomous mechanisms that preserve protein quality control during aging.
www.stjude.org/demontis
Varun Dwaraka
Head of Bioinformatics, TruDiagnostic, USA
Varun Dwaraka received his BS from University of California, Santa Cruz, and a PhD from the University of Kentucky. During his graduate work, Varun used NGS and array technologies to identify key genes implicated in initiating salamander limb regeneration, and using multi-omic approaches to identify their upstream epigenetic targets. Through this endeavor, Varun led to the development of whole genome methylome, transcriptomic, and other bioinformatic resources for the Mexican axolotl, the model salamander system used to study regeneration. These resources have been presented and published in regeneration biology and genomics. Now, Varun leads the development of epigenetic and multi-omic based clocks at TruDiagnostic, a company focusing on methylation array-based diagnostics to empower clinicians and researchers in better understanding the fluid epigenome.
Victor J. Dzau
President of the United States National Academy of Medicine, USA
Jennifer Elisseeff
Professor and Director, Translational Tissue Engineering Center
Wilmer Eye Institute and Departments of Biomedical, Engineering, Orthopedic Surgery, Chemical and Biological Engineering, and Materials Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University
Dr. Elisseeff is the Morton Goldberg Professor and Director of the Translational Tissue Engineering Center at Johns Hopkins Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Wilmer Eye Institute with appointments in Chemical and Biological Engineering, Materials Science and Orthopedic Surgery. She was elected a Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering, the National Academy of Inventors, a Young Global Leader by World Economic Forum. In 2018, she was elected to the National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Medicine and in 2019 she received the NIH Directors Pioneer Award.
Jennifer received a bachelor's degree in chemistry from Carnegie Mellon University and a PhD in Medical Engineering from the Harvard–MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. Later she was a Fellow at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, Pharmacology Research Associate Program, where she worked in the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research. She is committed to the translation of regenerative biomaterials and has founded several companies and participates in several industry advisory boards including Governor appointment to the State of Maryland's Technology Development Corporation (TEDCO).
Fabrizio d'Adda di Fagagna
National Research Council (CNR), Italy
Fabrizio d'Adda di Fagagna, Ph.D. is a cell and molecular biologist that studies the involvement of the DNA damage response (DDR) pathways in physiologically-relevant processes such as aging and cancer.
Fabrizio studied Biology at the University of Trieste and obtained his Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics at SISSA, the International School for Advanced Studies, in Trieste, Italy, while working at ICGEB (International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology) under the guidance of Mauro Giacca and Arturo Falaschi.
As a research associate and postdoc in Cambridge, UK, in the group of Steve Jackson at the Gurdon Institute , he discovered the engagement of DDR factors in the maintenance of telomeres and demonstrated that replicative cellular senescence, a form of cell aging, is the outcome of DDR activation caused by the direct recognition of critically short telomeres.
He then set up his own research group at IFOM (FIRC Institute of Molecular Oncology) in Milan, Italy, in 2003. Here, he demonstrated that oncogene activation is an intrinsically genotoxic event that, by altering DNA replication, causes DDR activation and cellular senescence establishment. Since then, he continued working on several aspects of cellular senescence.
His most exciting recent finding is the discovery of an unanticipated role of non-coding RNAs in the direct activation of the DDR. This discovery fuels most of his present investigative efforts.
In 2014, he was awarded a permanent position "for exceptional merits" at the Italian National Research Council (CNR) in Pavia, Italy, where he runs a laboratory. Fabrizio is an EMBO member and received several awards for his work, including the European Association for Cancer Research (EACR) Young Cancer Researcher Award and the EMBO Young Investigator Award. He received two ERC advanced grants.
Kristen Fortney
BioAge Labs, Inc., USA
Kristen Fortney is the co-founder and CEO of BioAge, a clinical-stage biotechnology
company developing a pipeline of treatments to extend healthy lifespan by targeting the molecular causes of aging. The company uses its discovery platform, which combines quantitative analysis of proprietary longitudinal human samples with detailed health records tracking individuals over the lifespan, to map out the key molecular pathways that impact healthy human aging. By targeting these pathways with a large and mechanistically diverse portfolio of drugs, BioAge will unlock opportunities to treat or even prevent diseases of aging in entirely new ways.
Kristen's scientific background is in aging biology and bioinformatics. She received her PhD in Medical Biophysics from the University of Toronto, followed by postdoctoral training at Stanford University where she was a fellow of the Ellison Medical Foundation / American Federation for Aging Research.
Arwen Gao
Amsterdam UMC
Arwen is specialized as a biomedical scientist and have extensive experience in metabolism, aging, and genetics in C. elegans. She was awarded for an AMC PhD scholarship to pursue her PhD thesis, focusing on the metabolic control of aging in C. elegans, and earned her PhD degree in 2018 at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. She continued her research on mitochondrial stress response and its role in metabolism and aging, under the supervision of prof. Johan Auwerx (EPFL, Switzerland) and supported by a post-doctoral fellowship (2019 Accelerator price winner). During the 3.5-year of postdoc training, she initiated several projects that were focused on the role of lysosomes and their functions involved in stress responses and longevity. In the summer of 2022, she moved back to the Netherlands and is currently a junior group leader at the Amsterdam UMC. Her research focuses on lysosome and aging, as well as translational projects that can benefit for patients with lysosome disorders.
Jennifer Garrison
Co-Founder and Director of the Global Consortium for Reproductive Longevity & Equality (GCRLE)
Assistant Professor at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging.
Jennifer Garrison, PhD, is Co-Founder and Director of the Global Consortium for Reproductive Longevity & Equality (GCRLE) and an Assistant Professor at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. She also holds appointments in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and the Leonard Davis School of Gerontology at the University of Southern California (USC). She is a passionate advocate for women's health and is pioneering a new movement to advance science focused on female reproductive aging. Her lab studies the role of inter-tissue communication in systemic aging, and how changes in the complex interactions between the ovary and brain during middle-age lead to the onset of reproductive decline in females.She has played an active role in the aging field, as a member of the Board of Directors for the American Aging Association (AGE), a reviewer for the American Federation of Aging Research (AFAR), and as Associate Director of the Buck-USC Biology of Aging PhD program. Dr. Garrison was named an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Neuroscience Research Fellow and an Allen Institute for Brain Science Next Generation Leader and is the recipient of a Glenn Medical Foundation Award for Research in Biological Mechanisms of Aging, and a Junior Faculty Award from the American Federation of Aging Research.
Anastasia Georgievskaya
CEO and Co-Founder of Haut.AI, Estonia
Anastasia Georgievskaya is the CEO and Co-Founder of Haut.AI, an IT company developing non-invasive skin aging and wellness biomarkers. Anastasia has a Master's Degree in Bioengineering and Biophysics from Lomonosov Moscow State University. Her areas of special interest are multifaceted mechanisms of the aging process and its impact on psychology.
Tyler Golato
Molecule, Switzerland
Scientific Lead at Molecule, is a biochemist, molecular biologist, and entrepreneur from the United States with a background in experimental therapeutics and biogerontology. He graduated from Stockton University before embarking on research fellowships at Columbia University and later, The National Institute of Aging. Tyler has developed novel therapeutics for treating several types of cancer, created new ways of measuring the DNA damage and repair response, and contributed to new theories around several rare genetic diseases.
Jörg Goldhahn
ETH, Switzerland
Jörg Goldhahn is an MD by training with postgraduate education in medical physics. He has a special interest in all stages of medical translation as the current head of the Institute for Translational Medicine and chair of the steering board of the digital Trial Intervention Platform (dTIP) at ETH. Age-related challenges in medical treatment, e.g. fracture repair in elderly patients, were the focus of the research carrier at different institutions including orthopedic clinics, large pharma, and ETH. Current research activities are focused around maintaining physical activity in high age, supported by novel technology such as wearables.
Vadim Gladyshev
Harvard, USA
Vadim Gladyshev is a Professor of Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Director of the Center for Redox Medicine, and Associate Member of the Broad Institute. He obtained all his degrees from Moscow State University, followed by postdoc training at the National Institutes of Health and a first faculty position at the University of Nebraska. He seeks to understand the nature of aging and to define the principles of lifespan control. His lab applies high-throughput and computational approaches to achieve systems level understanding of the aging process and develop interventions that extend lifespan
Vera Gorbunova
University of Rochester, USA
Vera Gorbunova is an endowed Professor of Biology at the University of Rochester and a co-director of the Rochester Aging Research Center. Her research is focused on understanding the mechanisms of longevity and genome stability and on the studies of exceptionally long-lived mammals. Dr. Gorbunova earned her B.Sc. degrees at Saint Petersburg State University, Russia and her Ph.D. at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. Dr. Gorbunova pioneered comparative biology approach to study aging. She also investigates the role of genomic instability and transposable elements in aging and disease. Recently she demonstrated that LINE1 elements trigger innate immune response that drives age-related sterile inflammation. She has more than 100 publications including publications in high profile journals such as Nature, Science and Cell. Her work received awards of from the Ellison Medical Foundation, the Glenn Foundation, American Federation for Aging Research, and from the National Institutes of Health. Her work was awarded the Cozzarelli Prize from PNAS, prize for research on aging from ADPS/Alianz, France, Prince Hitachi Prize in Comparative Oncology, Japan, and Davey prize from Wilmot Cancer Center.
Sara Hägg
Associate Professor (Docent) in molecular epidemiology at the Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Karolinska Institutet.
Sara's main research interest is in the field of aging and age-related diseases, applying molecular epidemiological methods. At the moment she is conducting analyses of different biological age predictors (telomere length, epigenetic clock, frailty index, etc) in several twin studies of aging (SATSA, GENDER, HARMONY, OCTO-Twin, TwinGene) within the Swedish Twin Registry and also using UK biobank data. The methods that Sara uses include longitudinal modelling, causal analyses using Mendelian Randomization, and large-scale genome-wide approaches.
For a more detailed description of her current research please visit Molecular epidemiology studies of aging and age-related diseases.
Jonas Hannestad
Tranquis Therapeutics, USA
Jonas Hannestad, Chief Medical Officer and Head of R&D at Tranquis Therapeutics, is a physician-neuroscientist with more than 20 years of translational and early clinical development experience in academia, mid-size pharma and high-growth biotech. He has broad drug-development expertise in multiple age-related diseases, including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, ALS, age-related macular degeneration, chronic kidney disease, and bullous pemphigoid with a deep understanding of disease mechanisms and pathophysiology. He has designed and led more than 10 Phase 1 and 2 trials and has global regulatory experience with multiple IND and CTA submissions and experience interfacing with FDA.
Lou Hawthorne
Founder & CEO, NaNotics LLC
Lou Hawthorne is the inventor of the company's core technology, NaNots, which are injectable absorptive nanoparticles designed to treat major diseases such as cancer and inflammatory conditions including sepsis and "inflamm-aging". NaNots are the subject of 13 granted patents as well as upcoming first-in-human studies at Mayo Clinic and other top-tier medical research centers.

Lou is a scientist-entrepreneur with 25+ years of experience in founding companies and leading interdisciplinary teams developing new technologies in biotech and life science. In 2002, Lou founded Genetic Savings & Clone, which spun off the agricultural cloning company Viagen, acquired by Intrexon (XON) in 2014. Lou also founded BioArts International, the first company to offer pet cloning services commercially. Advanced microfluidic embryo culture technology developed by BioArts for pet cloning was later out-licensed for use in human IVF.

Lou is a graduate of Princeton University where he was a University Scholar and recipient of the Ward Mathis Prize. He has been interviewed by most major newspapers, magazines, and television programs, including appearances on The Oprah Winfrey Show and Good Morning America. He resides in Mill Valley, CA.

Wei-Wu He
MBA Executive Chairman and CEO of Human Longevity, USA
Dr. He has been serving as Executive Chairman of Human Longevity Inc since July 2019. Prior to HLI, Dr. He was the CEO of OriGene Technologies, Inc. He also is the founder and General Partner of Emerging Technology Partners, LLC (ETP), a life sciences focused venture fund established since 2000. Dr. He has been involved in founding or funding over 80 biotech companies throughout his career. Dr. He is current Chairman fo Genetron Health (NASDAQ: GTH) and Chairman and CEO of Casi Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ: CASI). Dr. He was one of the first few scientists at Human Genome Sciences which was acquired by GSK. Prior to HGS, He was a research fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital and Mayo Clinic. Dr. He is an author to more than 30 research publications and inventor of over 30 issued patents. Dr. He received his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from Baylor College of Medicine and received an M.B.A. degree from the Wharton School.
Stephen Helliwell
Vice President Discovery Biology
Stephen Helliwell received his BSc Honours in Biochemistry from the University of
Kent in 1992. During his PhD in Biochemistry (1996) at the Biozentrum, University of Basel, he identified one of the targets (Tor1p) of the anti-aging drug rapamycin.
Following a short Post-Doctoral stay at the University of Bern, he moved to the
Department of Biology at MIT as a Post-Doctoral Fellow, discovering ubiquitination
factors controlling membrane protein sorting, and continued this research at the
Biozentrum, University of Basel until 2005. He joined the Novartis Institutes of
BioMedical Research in 2005, initially focusing on small molecule target
identification using chemogenomic profiling. In 2011 he started a program to improve mitochondrial dysfunction – a hallmark of aging and managed pre-clinical NASH program teams from 2016 to 2020. He joined Rejuveron 2 years ago to manage the biology of multiple drug discovery programs in the healthy aging space, and to oversee the biology side of diligence for novel programs joining Rejuveron.
Ian D. Hickson
PhD FMedSci FRS Director,
Center for Chromosome Stability, University of Copenhagen
Research in the Hickson laboratory has deciphered mechanisms for how genome instability can drive cancer development and has led to the development of novel therapeutic strategies to target difficult-to-treat cancers. While working in the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine, University of Oxford, he focused on the cancer predisposition disorder, Bloom's syndrome, using it as a model to define the molecular basis of tumorigenesis. Since moving to the University of Copenhagen, amongst many discoveries, he identified a pathway named MiDAS, which questioned the long-held view that genome duplication can only take place in S-phase by revealing that DNA synthesis occurs in mitosis following replication stress. These findings have opened new therapeutic avenues for targeting cancer. In 2013/14, he received both an ERC Advanced Grant and a Center of Excellence grant from Danmarks Grundforskningsfond to establish the Center for Chromosome Stability (CCS). His record of achievement has been recognized by his election to prestigious learned societies, including The Academy of Medical Sciences (UK), E.M.B.O. and The Royal Society (UK).
Emilio Hirsch
Professor of Experimental Biology in the Medical School, University of Torino
Emilio Hirsch is Professor of Experimental Biology in the Medical School, University of Torino since 2005. He has authored 280 scientific publications that received more than 25000 citations. He is an elected member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), Fellow of the International Society of Heart Research (ISHR) and receiver of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) innovator prize. He contributed seminal work in the characterization of key signal transduction enzymes named PI3Ks. He recently reported that loss of PI3K-C2alpha leads to cytokinesis defects, senescence, and cataract (Gulluni ta al., Science 2021). He is member of the BoD of Kaleyra Inc. He is founder of Kither Biotech that in 2022 received a series B financing of 18.5M € to develop airway disease treatments.
Wenming Huang
Postdoc researcher in Dr.Adam Antebi's group in Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing, Germany
Jens Juul Holst
The Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
From 1987 supported by the Danish Biotechnology programme; Yearly support from the Novo Nordisk Research Foundation since 1992; Recipient of 5- and 3-year research grants from The Danish Medical Research Council in 1991, 1996, 2001
and 2004, 2006 and 2008; Awarded research grants by the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation International in 1997 and 1998; 2002, recipient of a 3-year
research grant from European Foundation for the Study of Diabetes (EFSD). Additional EFSD grants in 2006 and 2009; Grant support from Novartis 2005-2008 and Merck (MSD) 2006-2009; Grant from FØSU (the Ministry of Higher Education and Science) 2008-10
UNIK (Universitetsforskningens InvesteringsKapital) grant 2009 ; One of 5 scientific directors of the 100 mio. € grant from the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research; Advanced ERC Grant for the project "Bypass without Surgery" in 2016, a 5-year research grant. 5- year research grant from the Danish fund Læge Sofus Carl Emil Friis og hustru Olga Doris Fr. for the project "Akromegali er en endokrin sygdom", 2018. In the same year, two research grants from the NovoNordisk Foundation, a 3-year research grant of 3mio. DKK for the project "Amino acids and glucagon constitute an endocrine feedback loop - The liver-alpha cell axis", and a NNF Tandem (Translational research collaboration between Basic and Clinical Researchers) project of 4mio DKK with the title "A new understanding of Glucagon Physiology - the liver-alpha cell axis".
Steve Horvath
Altos Labs, USA
Dr. Horvath is a biogerontologist, whose research lies at the intersection of several fields including epigenetic biomarkers of aging, preclinical and clinical studies, genomics, epidemiology, and comparative biology. Dr Horvath is a principal investigator at Altos Labs. He and his UCLA colleagues published the first epigenetic clock for saliva in 2011. In 2013, he published the first pan-tissue clock, also known as the Horvath clock. Recently, he presented a universal clock that applies to all mammals. The recipient of several awards, he has been on Clarivate's annual list of the world's most influential scientific researchers every year since 2018.
Christine Huang
MD, MPH
CEO, Hong Kong Quantum AI Lab
Dr.Christine Huang Yuan was selected as one of Forbes China 2020 "30s Under 30 (Healthcare and Science)". Dr.Huang currently is the Technology Transfer Director of the Hong Kong Quantum physics AI Lab (joint by HKU-Caltech) Dr.Huang has vast experience in the biotechnology field and shares her professional insights as a biomedicine investment consultant for China Internet Investment Finance Holding Limited (stock code: 0810. HK). She is also a member of the Advisory Board of Wing Wah Charity Foundation Hong Kong.
Laurence Ion
Steward of Longevity Dealflow at VitaDAO
Laurence is a longevity advocate, investor and VitaDAO Dealflow Steward. With a tech background and a keen passion for the scientific method, he's helping translate science into startups, on a mission to bring aging under medical control.
Mathias Jucker
Professor of Cell Biology of Neurological Diseases
Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain Research at the University of Tübingen
German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE)
Mathias Jucker is Professor of Cell Biology of Neurological Diseases at the Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain Research at the University of Tübingen and the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE). Jucker earned his Ph.D. at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich. He was then a postdoc and research scientist at the National Institute on Aging in Baltimore, USA. He returned to Switzerland as an assistant professor at the University of Basel, and in 2003 was called to his current position in Tübingen, Germany. The focus of his research is on the cellular and molecular mechanisms of brain aging and age-related neurodegenerative diseases. He has received several honors and prizes, including the Hamburg Science Award for Dementia Research (2013), the MetLife Award for Medical Research in Alzheimer´s Disease in New York (2014), and the International Prize for Translational Neuroscience of the Gertrud Reemtsma Foundation (Max-Planck-Society) (2020).
Matt Kaeberlein
Professor of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology,
Adjunct Professor of Genome Sciences,
Adjunct Professor of Oral Health Sciences, University of Washington
Dr. Matt Kaeberlein is a Professor of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology at the University of Washington (UW) School of Medicine, with Adjunct appointments in Genome Sciences and Oral Health Sciences. Dr. Kaeberlein's research interests are focused on biological mechanisms of aging in order to facilitate translational interventions that promote healthspan and improve quality of life. He has published more than 200 scientific papers and has been recognized by several prestigious awards including young investigator awards from the Ellison Medical Foundation and the Alzheimer's Association, the Vincent Cristofalo Rising Start in Aging Research Award, the Murdock Trust Award, the NIA Nathan W. Shock Award, and the Robert W. Kleemeier Award for outstanding research in the field of gerontology from the Gerontological Society of America (GSA). Dr. Kaeberlein has been awarded Fellow status with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Aging Association (AGE), and the GSA. Dr. Kaeberlein is currently the CEO and Chair of AGE, Past-President of AGE, has served on the Board of Directors for the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) and AGE, and has served as Biological Sciences Chair and on Council for GSA. Dr. Kaeberlein is the founding Director of the University of Washington (UW) Healthy Aging and Longevity Research Institute, the Director of the NIH Nathan Shock Center of Excellence in the Basic Biology of Aging at UW, Director of the Biological Mechanisms of Healthy Aging Training Program, and founder and co-Director of the Dog Aging Project.
Pekka Katajisto
Associate professor at the University of Helsinki and Karolinska Institutet, and Director at the Center of Excellence in Stem Cell Metabolism
Pekka Katajisto received his Ph.D. in 2009 from the University of Helsinki, for the work demonstrating that certain tumor suppressors can mediate their growth inhibitory function in a paracrine fashion. He then joined the laboratory of David Sabatini at the Whitehead Institute and MIT, to conduct postdoctoral research on cell-cell interactions in the context of stem cells and their surrounding niche. Currently, Dr. Katajisto runs two laboratories as the Associate Professor in Aging Biology, in HiLIFE, University of Helsinki, and in Department of Bioscience and Nutrition, Karolinska Institutet. His work focuses on the role of the niche-stem cell interaction and asymmetric cell division in aging. His discoveries include how the intestinal stem cell niche couples organismal nutrient status to the stem cell function, how alterations in nutrient sensing can result in secretion of novel aging factors, and that stem cells can segregate their organelles age-selectively during cell division. He is an ERC grantee, and the Director of the new Academy of Finland Center of Excellence in Stem cell metabolism.
Marina Martinić Kavur
Head of the science communications for Genos and GlycanAge
Marina Martinić Kavur, Ph.D., is a scientist and a head of the science communications for Genos and GlycanAge, and a lead editor of the GlycanAge Science Magazine. She finished a Master's degree in the field of Experimental biology, module Immunology and Physiology from the Faculty of Science, University of Zagreb, and a Ph.D. in the field of Molecular Biology at the Institute for Molecular Pathology as part of the VBC Ph.D. program, University of Vienna, Austria. During her Ph.D. studies, she spent part of the time at the Europen Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Heidelberg.
Brian Kennedy
National University of Singapore, Singapore
Dr. Brian Kennedy is internationally recognized for his research in the basic biology of aging and as a visionary committed to translating research discoveries into new ways of detecting, delaying, preventing and treating human aging and associated diseases. He is a Distinguished Professor in Biochemistry and Physiology at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine at National University Singapore and serves as Director of (1) the Centre for Healthy Longevity at the National University Health System, (2) the Healthy Longevity Translational Research Programme, and (3) the Asian Centre for Reproductive Longevity and Equality. Collectively, NUS aging research seeks to demonstrate that longevity interventions can be successfully employed in humans to extend healthspan, the disease-free and highly functional period of life.

From 2010 to 2016, Dr. Kennedy was the President and CEO of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging and he maintained a professorship there through 2020. Dr. Kennedy has an adjunct appointments at the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Washington, where he was a faculty member from 2001 to 2010. In addition, Dr. Kennedy is also actively involved with a number of Biotechnology companies. In addition, Dr. Kennedy serves as a Co-Editor-In-Chief at Aging Cell. Finally, Dr. Kennedy has a track record of interaction in China, where he was a Visiting Professor at the Aging Research Institute at Guangdong Medical College from 2009 to 2014. His Ph.D. was performed in the laboratory of Leonard Guarente at M.I.T., where he published the first paper linking Sirtuins to aging.
Mehmood Khan
CEO of Hevolution Foundation, Saudi Arabia
Dr. Khan's distinguished career has included a number of senior corporate roles, including Vice Chairman and Chief Scientific Officer of Global Research and Development at PepsiCo, and President of Global R&D at Takeda Pharmaceuticals. He is also currently the Executive Chairman of Life Biosciences Inc.
Before moving into industry Dr. Khan was a faculty member in endocrinology at the Mayo Clinic and Mayo Medical School where he served as Director of the Diabetes, Endocrine and Nutritional Trials Unit. He also led programs in diabetes, endocrinology, metabolism and nutrition in Minneapolis.
He is a member of the Board of Directors of Reckitt Benckiser; a Chairman of the Visiting Committee on Advanced Technology of the United States' National Institute of Standards and Technology, a member of the RDI Supreme Committee and a member of The National Biotechnology Strategy Steering Committee.
Dr. Khan earned his medical degree from the University of Liverpool Medical School, England, and completed a fellowship in clinical endocrinology and nutrition in the Department of Medicine and Food Science and Nutrition at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
He is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in London and a Fellow of the American College of Endocrinology.
James L. Kirkland
Robert and Arlene Kogod Center on Aging, USA
The major research focus of James L. Kirkland, M.D., Ph.D., is the impact of cellular aging (senescence) on age-related dysfunction and chronic diseases, especially developing methods for removing these cells and alleviating their effects. Senescent cells accumulate with aging and in such diseases as dementias, atherosclerosis, cancers, diabetes and arthritis.
The goal of Dr. Kirkland's current work is to develop methods to remove these cells to delay, prevent, alleviate or partially reverse age-related chronic diseases as a group and extend health span, the period of life free of disability, pain, dependence and chronic disease.
Dudley Lamming
Associate Professor of Medicine, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI
Dr. Lamming received his PhD from Harvard University in 2008, and then undertook postdoctoral research focused on the role of the mTOR signaling pathway in metabolism and aging at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. Since 2014 his laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has studied how what, when, and how much we eat regulates health and longevity. He is a Fellow of the American Aging Association and the Gerontological Society of America, a recipient of the Gerontological Society of America Nathan Shock New Investigator Award, and an editorial board member of several peer-reviewed scientific journals. His laboratory website is: https://lamminglab.medicine.wisc.edu/
Jean-Marc Lemaitre
Co-Director of the Institute of Regenerative Medicine and Biotherapies of Montpellier
He started his career in 1984 as engineer at CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research). After a Ph.D. of Molecular and Cellular Biology of Development at Paris 7 University received in 1995 and a Post-Doc at Jacques Monod Institute in Paris, he joined the Institute of Human Genetics of Montpellier (IGH), where he obtained a tenure position at INSERM (National Institute for Scientific and Medical Research) in 2004.

Awarded by an AVENIR INSERM Program in 2006, he obtained a senior Group leader position in 2010 at the Institute of Functional Genomics of Montpellier (IGF) working on Genome and Stem Cell Plasticity in Aging.

He identified replication timing domain signatures of physiological and accelerated aging, and revealed DNMT1 as a major actor in the reorganization of chromosomes in SAHFs during senescence induced by oncogene.

His main contributions also include the demonstration of cellular aging reversibility through a patented iPSC reprogramming strategy, as a new paradigm of cell rejuvenation and that a single in vivo transient reprogramming might prevent age related diseases.

He is co-founder and advisor of two startup INGRAALYS (dedicated to skin rejuvenation and hair regrowth by reprogramming strategies) and ORGANIPS (dedicated to the production of human organoids from iPSC).

Morgan Levine
Assistant Professor of Pathology and Epidemiology at the Yale School of Medicine
Morgan Levine is a ladder-rank Assistant Professor in the Department of Pathology at the Yale School of Medicine and a member of both the Yale Combined Program in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, and the Yale Center for Research on Aging. The overall goals of her lab are to:

1) Quantify the biological aging process that underlies the etiology of diseases ranging from cancer to Alzheimer's.

2) Discover mechanisms of aging that can be targeted to delay or prevent disease and extend life expectancy.

Her work relies on an interdisciplinary approach, integrating theories and methods from bioinformatics, cellular biology, and biostatistics to track trajectories aging cells, tissues, and organisms take through time. As PI or co-Investigator on multiple NIH-, Foundation-, and University-funded projects, she has extensive experience using systems-level and machine learning approaches to track epigenetic, transcriptomic, and proteomic changes with aging and incorporate this information to develop biomarkers of aging and disease risk.

Gordon Lithgow
Professor and Vice President, Academic Affairs at Buck Institute

A native of Scotland, Dr. Lithgow received his PhD from the University of Glasgow and obtained further training at Ciba Geigy AG in Basel, Switzerland, and at the University of Colorado. He established his lab studying the biology of aging at the University of Manchester, England, before moving it to the Buck Institute in 2000.

Dr. Lithgow has been recognized for his research with a Glenn Award for Research in Biological Mechanisms of Aging, a senior scholarship from the Ellison Medical Foundation, and the Tenovus Award for Biomedical Research. He has served on many national advisory panels in both the United Kingdom and the United States, including the National Institute on Aging's Board of Scientific Councilors, and has served as the chair of biological sciences at the Gerontology Society of America.

Dr. Lithgow has partnered with a series of biotechnology companies in sponsored research agreements and has strong collaborations in preclinical aging research on diseases such as osteoporosis and Parkinson's disease.
Luc J.C. van Loon
Professor, Department of Human Biology, Maastricht University Medical Centre, The Netherlands
Professor van Loon was appointed Professor of Nutrition and Exercise at Maastricht University in The Netherlands in 2010. He also serves as a visiting Professor at the Free University of Brussels in Belgium and the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne, Australia. Luc has an international research standing in the area of skeletal muscle metabolism, has published well over 400 peer-reviewed articles (more than 20.000 citations) achieving an H-index of 80. Current research in his laboratory focuses on the skeletal muscle adaptive response to physical (in)activity, and the impact of nutritional and pharmacological interventions to modulate metabolism in both health and disease. The latter are investigated on a whole-body, tissue, and cellular level, with skeletal muscle as the main tissue of interest. He is active in various media to translate research findings to the general public, highlighting the impact of nutrition and physical activity to support healthy aging.
João Pedro de Magalhães
Integrative Genomics of Ageing Group, University of Liverpool
Prof de Magalhaes graduated in Microbiology in 1999 from the Escola Superior de Biotecnologia in his hometown of Porto, Portugal, and then obtained his PhD in 2004 from the University of Namur in Belgium. Following a postdoc with genomics pioneer Prof George Church at Harvard Medical School, in 2008 Prof de Magalhaes was recruited to the University of Liverpool. He now leads the Integrative Genomics of Ageing Group (http://pcwww.liv.ac.uk/~aging/). His lab studies the ageing process and how we can manipulate it to fend off age-related diseases and improve human health. Prof de Magalhaes has authored over 100 publications and given over 100 invited talks, including three TEDx talks. He also makes regular media appearances (BBC, CNN, the Washington Post, the Financial Times and many others). Prof de Magalhaes is an advisor/consultant for various organizations, including nonprofit foundations, universities, investment funds and biotech companies. Prof de Magalhaesfounded Magellan Science Ltd (http://magellan-science.com), a company providing consulting services in longevity and data sciences.
Andrea B. Maier
Oon Chiew Seng Professor in Medicine and Functional Ageing, National University of Singapore, Professor of Gerontology Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Professor Maier, a Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians (FRACP), graduated in Medicine (MD) 2003 from the University of Lübeck (Germany), was registered 2009 in The Netherlands as Specialist in Internal Medicine-Geriatrics and was appointed Full Professor of Gerontology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (The Netherlands) in 2013. From 2016 to early 2021 Professor Maier has served as Divisional Director of Medicine and Community Care at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, Australia, and as Professor of Medicine and Aged Care at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She continues her career at the National University of Singapore as Co-Director of the Centre for Healthy Longevity. Professor Maier's research focuses on unraveling the mechanisms of ageing and age-related diseases. During the last 10 years she has conducted multiple international observational studies and intervention trials and has published more than 300 peer-reviewed articles, achieving an H index of 54, spearheading the significant contributions of her highly acclaimed innovative, global, multidisciplinary @Age research group. She is a frequent guest on radio and television programs to disseminate aging research and an invited member of several international academic and health policy committees. She currently is the President of The Australian and New Zealand Society for Sarcopenia and Frailty Research.
Anders Malarstig
Director at Pfizer, USA
Julia von Maltzahn
Research group leader
Leibniz Institute On Aging/Fritz Lipmann Institute (FLI)
Dr. Julia von Maltzahn has been a Group leader at the Leibniz Institute on Aging, Fritz-Lipmann Institute (FLI), Jena, Germany since October 2013 after working as a Postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Prof. Dr. Michael Rudnicki at the Sprott Center for Stem Cell Research in Ottawa, Canada. Her research focuses on intrinsic and extrinsic changes in muscle stem cells which occur during aging and how this affects regeneration of skeletal muscle.
Matthias Mann
Director at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry
Matthias Mann is director at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry near Munich and of the proteomics program at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research at the Medical School in Copenhagen. He is a pioneer and leader in mass spectrometry-based proteomics, where he has helped develop many of the foundational technologies such as electrospray, peptide sequence tags, quantitative proteomics and many more. The core interests of his groups are signal transduction, MS technological development and bioinformatics, with a main focus on clinical proteomics for better diagnosis, prognosis and biological understanding of diseases.
Joan Mannick
Co-Founder and CEO, Tornado Therapeutics
Joan Mannick is the Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Tornado Therapeutics which is developing next generation mTOR inhibitors to treat aging-related diseases. Prior to joining Tornado, Joan Mannick was Head of Research and Development at Life Biosciences and Chief Medical Officer of resTORbio which was a spinout of a clinical program targeting aging biology that she led as an Executive Director at the New Indications Discovery Unit of the Novartis Institutes of Biomedical Research. Prior to Novartis, Dr. Mannick was a Medical Director at Genzyme working in multiple therapeutic areas and was faculty member at Harvard Medical School and University of Massachusetts Medical School. Dr. Mannick received her A.B. from Harvard College and her M.D. from Harvard Medical School. She completed her residency in Internal Medicine and an Infectious Disease fellowship at Harvard Medical School.
Ana Martin-Villalba
Division head
Molecular Neurobiology (A290) German Cancer Research Center
Ana Martin-Villalba studied medicine in Murcia, Spain and Leeds, UK and received her Ph.D. from the University of Heidelberg for investigating the role of death ligands in the ischemic brain. Thereafter she moved to the german cancer research center (DKFZ) where she further worked on devicing strategies for CNS repair following stroke, spinal cord injuries or chronic CNS disorders with a focus on the interaction of the CNS with the innate immune system and activation of endogenous stem cells. This work has also generated some understanding of how cancer stem cell contribute to tumor progression and set the basis for a phase-II clinical trial that successfully increased the overall survival of a subgroup of glioblastoma patient. She was awarded the prestigious Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize and the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize for the development of pro-regenerative brain therapies. She was awarded an ERC grant in 2018, the female award of the german stem cell network 2019, and became EMBO member 2020. Her research now centers in understanding stem cell behaviour in homeostasis and disease including CNS-injuries and cancer, for which she has pioneered the application of single cell technologies.
Rebecca McIntyre
Amsterdam UMC
Rebecca McIntyre is a PhD student in the Laboratory Genetic Metabolic Diseases of the Amsterdam UMC in the Netherlands, working under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Riekelt Houtkooper and Dr. Georges Janssens. The work of her PhD is centered on (1) deepening understanding of mitochondrial dysfunction as a hallmark of aging, (2) identification of geroprotective pharmaceuticals using computational drug screening, and (3) validation and investigation of the mechanism of these pharmaceuticals using C. elegans.
Sarah Mitchell
ETH Zurich
Eric Morgen
COO, BioAge Labs, Inc.
Eric oversees BIOAGE's clinical and computational efforts to bring new therapeutics to the clinic that target fundamental mechanisms of aging. Eric was previously an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, where his research focused on biomarker discovery and characterization in high-dimensional datasets from human cohorts. He completed an HBSc in artificial intelligence, MD, clinical training in pathology, and a research fellowship in computational biology and molecular epidemiology at the University of Toronto, where he held a Canada Graduate Scholarship from the CIHR, and was subsequently a CIHR research fellow. He has published over 15 papers in the areas of molecular biomarker discovery, pharmacogenomics, aging, and diagnostic medicine. Eric is a licentiate of the Medical Council of Canada, a fellow of the Royal College
Alexey Moskalev
School of Systems Biology, George Mason University (GMU), Fairfax, VA, USA
Prof. Alexey Moskalev is a Corresponding member of Russian Academy of Sciences, Doctor of Biology, the Head of the Laboratory of Geroprotective and Radioprotective Technologies in the Institute of Biology of Komi Scientific Centre of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Head of the Department of Ecology of the Syktyvkar State University named after Pitirim Sorokin, the Head of the Laboratory of Genetics of Aging and Longevity in the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology
Andreas Mund
Associate Professor, Clinical Proteomics at the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research
Dr. Andreas Mund has a dual education profile with a degree in Biotechnology Engineering and a PhD in protein research and is part of the Prof. Matthias Mann lab. He received his PhD degree at the University of Hamburg, working with Prof. Hans Will at the Leibniz-Institute for Experimental Virology (HPI) in Hamburg, Germany. Afterwards he was awarded a Marie Sklodowska Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship to work on DNA repair mechanisms that maintain genomic stability using mouse models and proteomics at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research of the University of Copenhagen. He continued his career as Assistant Professor at the University of Copenhagen. From 2021 he became Guest Researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, in Munich, Germany, and in 2020 he became Associate Professor (Tenured) in Clinical Proteomics at the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, University of Copenhagen.
Dr Mund´s research focuses on the development and application of a novel interdisciplinary concept called `Deep Visual Proteomics´, which combines advanced imaging, artificial intelligence, and single-cell mass spectrometry-based proteomics to understand mechanisms of health and disease. The Deep Visual Proteomics study has been selected as the August 2022 cover story of Nature Biotechnology (https://www.nature.com/nbt/).
Laura Niedernhofer
University of Minnesota, USA
Her research career has been dedicated to investigating the impact of DNA damage on the structure of DNA, cell function and organism health. The DNA in each of our cells is damaged thousands of times per day by exposure to environmental factors, dietary components, chemotherapeutic agents and even endogenous by-products of normal metabolism. Studying patients with rare diseases caused by inherited defects in DNA repair provides important insight into the consequences of DNA damage. These patients have a dramatically increased risk of cancer and age prematurely. We engineered mouse models of these genome instability syndromes as a sensitive tool to test hypotheses about how DNA damage promotes cancer and aging.
Ellen Nollen
Group leader at the Laboratory of Molecular Neurobiology of Ageing, ERIBA, UMCG
Ellen Nollen is a professor of Molecular Biology of Aging and the interim director of the European Research Institute for the Biology of Ageing (ERIBA) at the University Medical Center Groningen. She is a molecular geneticist with expertise in basic molecular mechanisms of aging and age-related neurodegenerative diseases.With her research group, Ellen Nollen aims to uncover basic biological mechanisms that drive protein aggregation and toxicity during ageing. The group is combining the power of genetic studies in the small invertebrate model C. elegans with the development of tools to monitor accumulation and cellular- and behavioral toxicity of aggregation-prone proteins in worms. Nollen's team aims to translate findings in worms to human cells and mouse models for disease. Their studies provide new mechanistic insights into how cells and organisms cope with protein damage in health, ageing and disease.Ellen Nollen is a group leader at the Laboratory of Molecular Neurobiology of Ageing, which is part of the ERIBA, UMCG. Before that, she conducted research on the same subject at the department of Genetics of the UMCG, the Hubrecht-laboratory, part of Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Northwestern University in Chicago (USA). Since the completion of her PhD thesis in 2000 at the University of Groningen, Ellen Nollen has received several awards and fellowhsips, including a Rosalind Franklin Fellowship (2006), installed at the University of Groningen to promote the advancement of talented international female researchers at the highest levels of the institution. Nollen received the Alfred Tissières Young Investigator Award (2007), was named as an EMBO Young Investigator and was awarded an ERC Starting Independent Researcher Grant to consolidate her research group (2011).
Brenna Osborne
Assistant Professor, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Kamil Konrad Pabis
National University of Singapore, Singapore
Born in Poland, grew up and attended university in Vienna. Studied long-lived dwarf mice for my MSc in Vienna, worked on mitochondrial aging and disease in Newcastle, UK, and moved to Singapore to work on aging with Brian Kennedy. Blogger, writer (@Aging_Scientist), and longevity activist with a keen interest in human progress.
Ashik Ahmed Abdul Pari
German Cancer Research Institute, German
I am a Post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Vascular oncology and metastasis headed by Prof. Dr. Hellmut Augustin at the German Cancer Research Institute, Heidelberg. I did my Bachelors in Biotechnology from Anna University, Chennai. I moved to Switzerland to do my M.Sc in Life sciences and Technology specializing in Molecular Medicine at École Polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne. During my masters, I switched gears and chose an industrial environment at Merck, Darmstadt, Germany, to pursue my master's thesis. At Merck, I performed an shRNA screen on proteins involved in the autophagy pathway to identify potential druggable candidate molecules which can be used to inhibit autophagy in vitro and in vivo. For my PhD, I focused on the role of the tumor microenvironment in tumorigenesis. Using pre-clinical mouse models, we identified the critical primary tumor-derived factors that drove tumor progression. Currently, I study how the host microenvironment actively shapes the process of metastasis and how this is altered in aged settings.
Linda Partridge
Professor Dame Linda Partridge FRS FRSE FMedSci,
Founding Director of the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing in Cologne, Germany,
Professorial Research Fellow at the Institute of Healthy Ageing, and GEE, at UCL
Biological Secretary elect at the Royal Society in London
Linda Partridge works on the biology of ageing. Her research is directed to understanding the mechanisms by which healthy lifespan can be extended in laboratory model organisms and humans. Her work has focussed in particular on the role of nutrient-sensing pathways and diet, and her primary interest is in geroprotective drugs. She is the recipient of numerous awards, was honoured with a DBE for Services to Science in 2009 and is a Fellow of the Royal Society. She is the founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing and the Biological Secretary of the Royal Society.
Shahaf Peleg
Group leader, FBN, Germany
Shahaf Peleg received his BSc from Ben Gurion University, Israel in 2006 and his PhD from the University of Göttingen, Germany in 2010 where he was part of the international Max Planck Research School (IMPRS) of Neuroscience. He later did his postdoctoral training at the University of Munich where he focused on metabolism – epigenetics connectivity during early aging. Since 2018, his laboratory at the the FBN is working mainly on flies and Giant mice (Titan, Rock, Dummerstorf mouse lines). He is seeking to better understand molecular changes that are associated with the progression of aging. Recently, he is interested in novel approaches to extend healthy life span, which center around the concept of energy replacement. To this end, he uses recent technology that enables metazoans to harness the energy of light and translate it to chemical energy in their mitochondria.
Tim Peterson
VitaDAO
Interests include genetic (CRISPR and mRNA) technologies to treat aging, computational approaches to monitor aging, and small molecule drug mechanisms of action.
James Peyer
Cambrian Biopharma, USA
James Peyer also serves as the Chairman of the Board of Sensei Biotherapeutics and holds additional board and executive roles across Cambrian's pipeline. He has spent his entire life dedicated to the mission of finding ways to prevent people from getting diseases like cancer and Alzheimer's instead of waiting for them to get sick. James was previously Founder and Managing Partner at Apollo Ventures, the first global longevity-focused venture capital firm, investing across the US and Europe. Prior to Apollo, James was a biotech R&D specialist at the New York office of McKinsey & Company, serving major pharmaceutical clients. He earned his PhD in stem cell biology at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center as a National Science Foundation Fellow, and his B.A. with special honors from the University of Chicago.
Michael Ringel
Managing Director and Senior Partner at BCG
Michael Ringel is a Managing Director and Senior Partner at BCG, and BCG's Global Topic Leader for Growth and Innovation. He is a frequent author and speaker on R&D and innovation topics. His TED talk on innovation can be viewed at TED.com. He is also Strategic Advisor to Life Biosciences, a company targeting aging biology to address multiple diseases.

Prior to BCG, Michael worked in academia, pursuing research in theoretical population dynamics and conducting field experiments in the Amazon basin near Manaus, Brazil. Michael holds a B.A. summa cum laude in biology from Princeton, a Ph.D. in biology from Imperial College, and a J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School. He Chairs the Board of the ATOM Consortium, a public-private partnership with a mission of transforming drug development using advanced analytics.
Matthew Scholz
CEO of Oisin Bio, USA
Matt is Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Oisín Bio. A serial entrepreneur with a background in computer security and immunology, Matt is also the founder and CEO of Immusoft, a biotech firm developing a breakthrough technology that will turn a patient's B cells into miniature drug factories. Matthew speaks and presents regularly to university, association and scientific audiences, including those at his alma mater, the University of Washington. He served for several years as a mentor to recipients of the Thiel Fellowship, a program that awarded grants to some of the world's brightest scientific minds under age 20.
Prof. Tzipora Strauss
MD, Chaim Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer, Israel
Prof. Tzipi Strauss specialized in Pediatrics at the Sheba Medical Center. During her internship she spent two years in the Netherlands at the Leiden University Medical Center LUMC and conducted a research in the Department of Premature Infants. Later she specialized in neonatology and premature neonatal medicine at Sheba.

In 2010 she was appointed Deputy Director of the Edmond and Lily Safra Children's Hospital and in 2012 was appointed Director of the Neonatology Department and NICU. She later received her MSc in Health care management from Harvard University.

Her main areas of research are hemostasis and coagulation in preterm infants

Markus Schosserer
Medical University of Vienna
Dr. Markus Schosserer has been a principal investigator at the Medical University of Vienna, Center for Pathobiochemistry and Genetics, Institute of Medical Genetics, Austria, since 2022. He received his Ph.D. in Biotechnology from the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, in 2012. Since September 2020, he has been module head of the CD-Lab for Multimodal Imaging of Aging and Senescence of the Skin (SkinMAGINE).

His research interests lie in biogerontology, skin aging, and RNA biology, particularly RNA modifications, ribosomes, and protein translation. Markus Schosserer is also interested in advanced microscopy techniques, including Raman and STED.

Markus Schosserer co-authored 42 papers (July 2022) and presented his work at several national and international conferences and seminars as an invited speaker. He won several posters and talk awards and collaborates actively with researchers in several other disciplines of aging research and RNA/ribosome biology.
Sam Sharifi
Ph.D. is co-founder of Matter Bioworks
Joseph Takahashi
Professor and Chair, Department of Neuroscience
Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center
Joseph S. Takahashi, PhD is the Loyd B. Sands Distinguished Chair in Neuroscience, Investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and Chair of the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. Takahashi received a B.A. in biology from Swarthmore College in 1974 and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of Oregon, Eugene, in 1981. For postdoctoral training, he was a pharmacology research associate at the National Institute of Mental Health. His research interests are the molecular mechanism of circadian clocks, neuroscience, and the genetic basis of behavior. Dr. Takahashi pioneered the use of genetics in the mouse as a tool for discovery of genes underlying neurobiology and behavior, and his discovery of the mouse and human Clock genes led to a description of a conserved circadian clock mechanism in animals. He is the author of more than 300 scientific publications and the recipient of many awards including the Honma International Prize in Biological Rhythms Research in 1986, W. Alden Spencer Award in Neuroscience from Columbia University in 2001, Outstanding Scientific Achievement Award from the Sleep Research Society in 2012, and the Gruber Neuroscience Prize in 2019. He was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000, Member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2003, and Member of the National Academy of Medicine in 2014.
Emma Teeling
Professor, University College Dublin
Emma Caroline Teeling is an Irish zoologist, geneticist and genomicist, who specialises in the phylogenetics and genomics of bats. Her work includes understanding of the bat genome and study of how insights from other mammals such as bats might contribute to better understanding and management of ageing and a number of conditions, including deafness and blindness, in humans. She is the co-founder of the Bat1K project to map the genomes of all species of bat. She is also concerned with understanding of the places of bats in the environment and how to conserve their ecosystem.
Teeling is a full professor at University College Dublin, where she has founded two scientific centres: the Laboratory of Molecular Evolution and Mammalian Phylogenetics (also known as the "BatLab"), and the Dublin part of the Centre for Irish Bat Research. Teeling is widely cited in her areas of study and is an elected member of Ireland's national academy, the Royal Irish Academy.
Alexander Tyshkovskiy
Harvard Medical School, USA
Dr. Alexander Tyshkovskiy is a postdoctoral research fellow in the laboratory of systems biology of aging led by Dr. Vadim Gladyshev at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School. He obtained MS degree in bioengineering and bioinformatics at Moscow State University followed by PhD degree in life sciences at Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology. His main scientific interest is identification of functional molecular biomarkers of biological aging and longevity that can be applied for the effective screening of novel lifespan-extending interventions, using high-throughput data analysis and methods of computational biology and machine learning.
Eric Verdin
Buck Institute, USA
Dr. Verdin is the president and chief executive officer of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. A native of Belgium, Dr. Verdin received his Doctorate of Medicine (MD) from the University of Liege and completed additional clinical and research training at Harvard Medical School. He has held faculty positions at the University of Brussels, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Picower Institute for Medical Research. Dr. Verdin is also a professor of medicine at University of California, San Francisco.

Dr. Verdin studies how metabolism, diet, and small molecules regulate the activity of HDACs and sirtuins, and thereby the aging process and its associated diseases, including Alzheimer's. He has published more than 210 scientific papers and holds more than 15 patents. He is a highly cited scientist (top 1 percent) and has been recognized for his research with a Glenn Award for Research in Biological Mechanisms of Aging and a senior scholarship from the Ellison Medical Foundation. He is an elected member of several scientific organizations, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Society for Clinical Investigation, and the Association of American Physicians. He also serves on the advisory council of National Institute on Drug Abuse at the National Institutes of Health.
Marco Quarta
CEO, Co-founder, Rubedo Life Sciences, USA
Marco co-founded and leads Rubedo Life Sciences driving its mission to develop treatments for age-related diseases and extend healthspan by selectively targeting pathological cells involved in the biological aging process. As a scientist, he earned a Masters degree in Biotechnology, a PhD in Neuroscience, and post-doctoral training in Aging and Stem Cells Biology in the lab of his mentor Prof. Thomas Rando at Stanford University School of Medicine. He then directed at Stanford/VA Hospital Palo Alto a research team focused on translational medical research in the fields of aging and regenerative medicine. He is backed by over 20 years of research with a track record of scientific publications in top tier journals. Marco is an inventor and entrepreneur, he co-founded and led the international biotech umbrella organization Young European Biotech Network (YEBN), and later joined the European Federation of Biotechnology (EFB) executive board. Quarta founded and led the biotech company "WetWare Concepts" in Europe. In California, with the Stanford colleague Prof. Vittorio Sebastiano he also co-founded "Turn Biotechnologies" based on their work on epigenetic reprogramming of cellular aging, where he served as CSO and he is a Board Director. Quarta sits on the advisory board of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) – Calpoly program in regenerative medicine. He is in the advisory and research board at the Center for Healthcare Innovation (CHI). He is a member of the Paul F Glenn Center for the Biology of Aging Studies at Stanford University. Quarta keeps fostering and championing high standards of compliance, ethics and patient safety in the development of innovative translational therapeutics, putting patients and society at the center of all actions.
Dina Radenkovic
Co-founder & CEO of Gameto
Co-founder & CEO of Gameto, a new breed of biotechnology company in female reproductive longevity with the mission to solve the problem of accelerated ovarian aging and change the trajectory of women's health and equality. Dina was previously a Partner at SALT Bio Fund (salt.org). She had research posts at King's College London and the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. She was a co-founder & Chief Science Officer of Hooke, an elite longevity research clinic in London launched in partnership with Dr Eric Verdin from the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. Dina qualified with a dual degree in medicine and physiology from UCL Medical School, with the elective at the New England Journal of Medicine, Harvard University, awarded number one in preclinical medicine and the best overall performance in physiology BSc. Dina did her residency at St Thomas' Hospital in London. She has over 30 academic papers, 7 grants and over 40 scientific conference presentations. She is fluent in 5 languages and 3 programming languages.
Morten Scheibye-Knudsen
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Morten Scheibye-Knudsen is Associate Professor and group leader at the Center for Healthy Aging, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Besides his research activity, he has been committed to educational programs and his online companies Mitodb.com and Forsøgsperson.dk. The latter has grown to become the largest single provider of study participants in Denmark. Morten Scheibye-Knudsen earned his MD in 2007 and his PhD in 2016 from the University of Copenhagen. After graduation, he worked as physician at Slagelse Hospital and at Nuuk Medical Clinic in Greenland. In 2008, he became a Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Institute on Aging at the NIH in Baltimore, Maryland. His work focused on the cross-talk between DNA repair and mitochondrial function in aging and has been honored by a number of competitive awards. In 2015 he was recruited to start his own research group at the University of Copenhagen, where his research group aims to understand the cellular and organismal consequences of DNA damage in the context of aging. With the ultimate goal to modulate and perhaps treat aging and age-related diseases, allowing everyone to live healthier and longer lives.
Björn Schumacher
Director, Institute for Genome Stability in Aging and Disease
University of Cologne
Since 2013, Björn Schumacher is full professor and director of the Institute
for Genome Stability in Ageing and Diseases (IGSAD) at the CECAD
Research Centre of the University of Cologne. He received his PhD at the
Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Munich and conducted his
postdoctoral research as EMBO and Marie Curie fellow at the Erasmus
Medical Centre in Rotterdam. Professor Schumacher is President of the
German Society for DNA Repair (DGDR), co-Director of the Minerva Center
of the Biological Mechanisms of Healthy Ageing at Bar-Ilan University (IL),
and between 2014 and 2020 served as President of the German Society
for Ageing Research (DGfA). He was awarded with the Eva Luise Köhler
Research Prize, the Innovation Prize of the State of North Rhine-
Westphalia, the European Research Council (ERC) starting grant,
coordinated the FP7 Marie Curie initial training network on chronic DNA
damage in ageing (CodeAge) and serves on several editorial boards. His
research interest focuses on the molecular mechanisms through which
DNA damage contributes to cancer development and ageing-associated
diseases. Employing the C. elegans system and mammalian disease
models, his group uncovered cell-autonomous and systemic responses
through which the organism adapts to accumulating DNA damage with
ageing. Through the understanding of the basic mechanisms of genome
instability-driven ageing, Schumacher aims to contribute to the
development of future strategies to prevent ageing-associated diseases.
Felipe Sierra
PhD, Chief Scientific Officer at Hevolution Foundation, Saudi Arabia
Dr. Sierra's career has spanned academia, industry and government, including his role as Director of the Division of Aging Biology at the NIA/NIH, from 2006 to 2019, where he was an important contributor to the development of the concept of Geroscience, including the creation and leadership of the trans-NIH Geroscience Interest Group (GSIG). Before joining Hevolution in 2022, he was Director of Geroscience for Inspire.
Dr. Sierra holds a Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Florida and was an Assistant Professor at the Medical College of Pennsylvania, and an Associate Professor at the Lankenau Institute for Medical Research in Pennsylvania.
David A. Sinclair
Professor in the Genetics Department at the Blavatnik Institute, Harvard Medical School, Boston & Co-Director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research, honorary Professor at the University of Sydney, and co-founder of the journal Aging
Dr. Sinclair obtained a BS and a Ph.D. at UNSW, worked as a postdoctoral researcher at M.I.T., was hired at Harvard Medical School in 1999 as an Assistant Professor, and promoted to tenured Professor in 2008. His book Lifespan: Why We Age and Why We Don't Have To, a NYT bestseller, is published in more than 20 languages.
Dr. Sinclair is an inventor on more than 50 patents, 170 papers, an h-index of 103 & cited 73,000+ times. His more than 40 awards include an Excellence in Teaching Award, Harvard, AFAR Fellowship, the Ellison Medical Foundation Scholarships, Genzyme Outstanding Achievement Award, Telluride Technology Award, Innovator of the Year, MERIT Award, Nathan Shock Award, Denham Harman Award, ASMR Medal, Advance Global Australian, Pioneer Award, TIME100's most influential people, TIME magazine's Heathcare 50, Irving Wright Award, AFAR, and is an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO).
He cofounded Sirtris Pharma (Cambridge; NASDAQ:SIRT, bought by GSK), Genocea (Cambridge, MA; NASDAQ:GNCA); Ovascience (NASDAQ:OVAS), Cohbar (Menlo Park NASDAQ:CWBR)), MetroBiotech, ArcBio, Liberty Biosecurity, Galilei, Immetas, EdenRoc Sciences and affiliates, and Life Biosciences and affiliates.
David Sinclair is a founder, equity owner, advisor to, director of, and/or inventor of patents licensed to Metrobiotech, Jumpstart Fertility, Liberty Biosecurity, Animal Biosciences, EdenRoc Sciences, Life Biosciences, Cohbar, Galilei, Spotlight Biosciences, Arc-Bio, Dovetail Genomics, Claret Bio, Selphagy, Iduna, Senolytic Therapeutics, Continuum, Immetas and a licensed unpaid HMS patent to Elysium Health. More info: https://sinclair.hms.harvard.edu/david-sinclairs-affiliations"
Anu Suomalainen
Academy Professor of Clinical Molecular Medicine in the University of Helsinki and Chief Physician in the University Helsinki Hospital
Dr. Suomalainen received her MD PhD degree from University of Helsinki and has worked as a visiting scientist/ postdoc /visiting professor in Columbia University, Montreal Neurological Institute and UC Berkeley, respectively. She heads her translational Mitochondrial Medicine research group in University of Helsinki, Faculty of Medicine, and focuses on molecular pathophysiology, metabolic reprogramming, stress responses and mechanisms of tissue-specificity in mitochondrial and degenerative disorders and aging, and uses molecular knowledge to develop tailored treatments.
Jonas Treebak
Associate professor and group leader
Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research at University of Copenhagen
Jonas Thue Treebak received his PhD from University of Copenhagen in 2009 and was recruited to the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research at University of Copenhagen in 2011 where he is currently associate professor and group leader. The overarching goal of his research is to define molecular and physiological mechanisms by which dietary compounds, weight loss, and physical activity improve insulin sensitivity to prevent and treat type 2 diabetes. His group interrogates signaling pathways controlling cellular glucose and lipid homeostasis in cell-based and animal models. Key research questions aim to define mechanisms linking NAD+ and metabolic health, and he have defined novel roles of NAD+ biosynthetic pathways for tissue and cellular function. In particular, his group has identified a key role of nicotinamide phosphoribosyltransferase (NAMPT) for maintaining NAD+ levels and metabolic health in skeletal muscle, liver, the hypothalamus, and adipose tissue. Moreover, his group has performed pioneering work to identify how NAD+ precursors affect metabolic health in people with obesity and insulin resistance.
Maximilian Unfried
National University of Singapore, University of Copenhagen, VitaDAO
Max is currently pursuing his PhD on the intersection of Aging Biology, Lipidomics and Artifical Intelligence. He splits his time between the Kennedy Lab in Singapore and the Scheibye-Knudsen Lab in Copenhagen. As part of the crypto-collective VitaDAO he is also involved in funding and promoting aging research.
Quentin Vanhaelen
Insilico Medicine
Dr. Quentin Vanhaelen is the director of Virtual Human Project at Insilico Medicine. Dr. Vanhaelen graduated from University of Brussels (ULB) with a master's degree in theoretical physics. He pursued a PhD in physics in Brussels from 2006 to 2010 while performing several projects within the field of system biology. After completing his PhD, he moved to Canada from 2011 to 2013 to work at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute (OHRI). His research was focused on the modeling of the dynamics of signaling pathways and gene regulatory networks and their roles within stem cell fate decision. He founded his consultancy company, Insilicoscreen, focused on the analysis of signaling pathways dynamics. This company was later acquired by Insilico Medicine in 2015. Dr. Vanhaelen has authored and co-authored several publications on different topics such as non-equilibrium thermodynamics of fluid-fluid interface, evolutionary theories of aging and computational analysis of signaling pathway dynamics. He has recently edited a book on computational methods for drug repurposing published in the Springer series Methods in Molecular Biology. His research interests focus on the non-programmed theories of aging, analysis of signaling pathways dynamics and applications of deep learning techniques for drug repurposing and discovery.
Pingze Zhang
Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing
Pingze is pursuing his PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing under the supervision of Prof. Linda Partridge. His current research focuses on the molecular and physiological mechanisms of the mTOR signalling pathway in ageing and age-associated diseases.
Alex Zhavoronkov
Insilico Medicine, Hong Kong
Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, is the founder and CEO of Deep Longevity, Inc, a global company developing a broad range of artificial intelligence-based biomarkers of aging and longevity. He is also the founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine (insilico.com), a leader in next-generation artificial intelligence technologies for drug discovery, and biomarker development. Since 2015 he invented critical technologies in the field of generative adversarial networks (GANs) and reinforcement learning (RL) for generation of the novel molecular structures with the desired properties and generation of synthetic biological and patient data. He also pioneered the applications of deep learning technologies for prediction of human biological age using multiple data types, transfer learning from aging into disease, target identification, and signaling pathway modeling. Under his leadership Insilico raised over $50 million in multiple rounds from expert investors, opened R&D centers in 6 countries and regions, and partnered with multiple pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and academic institutions. Prior to founding Insilico, he worked in senior roles at ATI Technologies (acquired by AMD in 2006), NeuroG Neuroinformatics, Biogerontology Research Foundation. Since 2012 he published over 130 peer-reviewed research papers, and 2 books including "The Ageless Generation: How Biomedical Advances Will Transform the Global Economy" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). He serves on the editorial boards of Aging Research Reviews, Aging, Trends in Molecular Medicine, Frontiers in Genetics, and co-chairs the Annual Aging Research, Drug Discovery and AI Forum (7th annual in 2020) at Basel Life, one of Europe's largest industry events in drug discovery. He is the adjunct professor of artificial intelligence at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging.
Garri Zmudze
General Partner at LongeVC and executive coordinator at Longevity Science Foundation