Special Issue: Meet the editors for aging, geroscience and longevity

Jess Tyler, Weill Cornell Medicine
Jessica Tyler is a Professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, USA. Dr Tyler revealed that chromatin assembly and disassembly not only regulates S phase events, but also gene expression and the DNA damage response. Her recent work has extended to the broader influence of chromatin assembly on mitosis, aging and cancer.

Matt Kaeberlein, University of Washington
Matt Kaeberlein is a Professor at the University of Washington, USA. His research interests are focused on basic mechanisms of aging in order to facilitate translational interventions that promote healthspan and improve quality of life. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Aging Association and the Gerontological Society of America. In addition to his primary appointments, Dr Kaeberlein is the co-Director of the University of Washington Nathan Shock Center of Excellence in the Basic Biology of Aging, the founding Director of the Healthy Aging and Longevity Research Institute at the University of Washington, and founder and co-Director of the Dog Aging Project.

Weiwei Dang, Baylor College of Medicine
Weiwei Dang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular and Human Genetics, and the Huffington Center on Aging, at Baylor College of Medicine, USA. He is also CPRIT Scholar for Cancer Research. Dr Dang’s research focuses on the roles of epigenetics and chromatin dynamics in aging regulation. His earlier work was among the first to demonstrate that changes in epigenetic markings can causatively alter lifespan in the budding yeast. More recently, he and his team have discovered a novel form of stress response called Chromatin Architectural Defect (CAD) response that becomes activated when nucleosomes are lost from the chromatin, a phenomenon found in aged cells and tissues.

Sara Hägg, Karolinska Institutet
Sara Hägg is a Senior Researcher at the Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Karolinska Institutet (KI) in Stockholm, Sweden. She did her undergraduate training at Stockholm University majoring in Molecular Biology (MSc) and Computer Science (BSc) and completed her thesis in Computational Biology (PhD) at Linköping University, Sweden, in 2009. She then carried out postdoc training in Genetic and Molecular Epidemiology at KI and Uppsala University, Sweden. Since 2015, Dr Hägg has run her own research group at KI focusing on molecular epidemiological studies of aging, with a special focus on biological age predictors.

Jing-Dong Jackie Han, Peking University
Prof Jing-Dong Jackie Han obtained her PhD degree at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, USA, followed by postdoctoral training at The Rockefeller University and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, USA. In 2004, she became an investigator/professor at the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), China. From 2010 to 2019, she served as a director at the CAS-Max Planck Partner Institute for Computational Biology. In 2019, she became a tenured professor at Peking University, China. Her research focuses on the structure and dynamic inference of molecular networks, using a combination of large-scale experiments and computational analysis to explore the design principles of the networks and to find how the complex phenotypes, such as aging, cancer and stem cell development, are regulated through molecular networks.

Pankaj Kapahi, The Buck Institute
Pankaj Kapahi is a Professor at The Buck Institute, USA. Dr Kapahi’s lab employs an interdisciplinary approach, combining biochemical, genetic and genomic techniques, and uses invertebrate models such as C. elegans, Drosophila melanogaster and mice to understand how nutrients influence lifespan and age-related diseases. The lab has made significant contributions in the areas of nutrient responses, aging and metabolism, including identifying the role of target of rapamycin (TOR) and implicating mRNA translation in mediating lifespan extension by dietary restriction. Another equally important finding was that modulation of mRNA translation, a critical output of the TOR pathway, plays a significant role in determining lifespan in worms and flies.

Dario Valenzano, Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing
Dario Riccardo Valenzano leads a research group at the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing and at the CECAD in Cologne, Germany. He studied neuroscience at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, Italy, and did a postdoc in genetics at Stanford University, USA. He researches the evolutionary genomic basis of aging and lifespan in nature and investigates the impact of commensal gut microbes on their host’s aging. His main model system is the naturally short-lived turquoise killifish (Nothobranchius furzeri), which he studies in his lab in Cologne and in its natural habitat in the African savannah.