Harvard Medical School · Boston, Massachusetts
Three days in Boston celebrating a quarter century of discovery, mentorship, and the people who made it possible.
Welcome
Dear Friends,
Twenty-five years ago, having been trained in world-class science and yeast aging research in Lenny Guarente’s lab at MIT, we began with a simple question: why do we age, and can we do something about it? I have been extraordinarily fortunate to work with some of the smartest and hardest working students and postdocs, many of whom have become highly successful in their own careers, and I couldn’t be prouder.
This gathering is for all of you. Whether you spent years at the bench here or have donated to the lab, you are part of the story: its history, its present, and everything still ahead.
Thank you for being here to celebrate with us.
With gratitude,
David
Hosted by the Sinclair Lab
Harvard Medical School
Agenda
All times Eastern. Program details subject to change.
October 4
Cocktail hour
Welcome remarks and history of the lab
With David Sinclair, Leonard Guarente, Li-Huei Tsai, and Matthew LaPlante
Dinner and award presentation
Presentation by Christoph Gorgulla
Closing remarks
With David Livingston
Evening concludes
October 5
Breakfast
The Rotunda
Talks and poster sessions
Lecture by Yuancheng Ryan Lu, followed by poster sessions
Lunch
The Rotunda
Afternoon program
Armenise Amphitheater. Talks by Nalat Siwapornchai, Christopher Petty, and Kelly Rich, followed by a fireside chat with David Sinclair, Peter Diamandis, and Andrew Scott
Symposium concludes
Cocktail hour and private gallery viewing
Dinner and program
With Steve Horvath and Michael Ringel
Evening concludes
October 6
Lab alumni and current lab students only
Breakfast
Alumni talks and program
Talks by Dudley Lamming, Joseph Baur, Philipp Oberdoerffer, Lindsay Wu, Patrick Griffin, Xiao Tian, and Sharon Rosenzweig‑Lipson.
Lunch
Gathering concludes
Speakers
Select a speaker to read their full biography.
Sunday, October 4
Professor of Genetics, Harvard Medical School
Novartis Professor of Biology, MIT
Picower Professor of Neuroscience, MIT
Faculty, Utah State University, and co-author of Lifespan
Principal Investigator, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
President and Chief Scientific Officer, MetroBiotech
Monday, October 5
Research Associate, Whitehead Institute and MIT
PhD Candidate, Sinclair Lab, Harvard Medical School
PhD Candidate, Sinclair Lab, Harvard Medical School
Postdoctoral Fellow, Sinclair Lab, Harvard Medical School
Founder and Chairman, XPRIZE
Professor of Economics, University of Oxford
Monday, October 5
Tuesday, October 6
Professor of Medicine, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Professor of Physiology, University of Pennsylvania
Associate Professor, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine
Scientia Fellow, UNSW Sydney
Postdoctoral Fellow, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
Assistant Professor, Sanford Burnham Prebys
Chief Scientific Officer, Life Biosciences
Venues
Boston, Massachusetts
Welcome Dinner · Sunday, October 4
HMS Symposium, morning · Monday, October 5
Alumni Gathering · Tuesday, October 6
HMS Symposium, afternoon · Monday, October 5
Gala Dinner · Monday, October 5
With thanks
Twenty-five years of research rests on many foundations: grants, institutional partners, collaborators, and friends who believed in the questions early. To those who have supported the work, thank you. If you would like to learn more about where the lab is headed, we would welcome the conversation.
marissa@davidasinclair.comWelcome Dinner · Sunday, October 4
Professor of Genetics, Harvard Medical School
David A. Sinclair, A.O., Ph.D. is a leading figure in the study of human longevity, and is a tenured Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School.
His pioneering work in genetics and aging biology has fundamentally shaped understanding of the mechanisms of aging and age-related diseases, including research on sirtuins, NAD+ metabolism, and epigenetic regulation.
He is the New York Times bestselling author of Lifespan, host of the Lifespan show, inventor on more than 50 patents, and co-founder of numerous successful companies, including MetroBiotech, EdenRoc Sciences, Fully Aligned Company, and Life Biosciences.
Welcome Dinner · Sunday, October 4
Novartis Professor of Biology, MIT
Leonard Guarente is the Novartis Professor of Biology, and an affiliate of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. His lab discovered the role of a family of proteins termed sirtuins in aging and disease and the function of sirtuins as NAD+ dependent protein deacetylases. He is a member of the French Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and recipient of the AFAR highest achievement award for aging research. He is currently analyzing aging of the human brain and how it relates to neurodegenerative diseases. He is on the editorial boards of Cell Metabolism, Trends in Genetics, EMBO Reports, Aging, and Experimental Gerontology. He is a founder of Elysium Health and Galilei BioSciences, and on the scientific advisory boards of Segterra and Sebelius.
Welcome Dinner · Sunday, October 4
Picower Professor of Neuroscience, MIT
Professor Li-Huei Tsai is the Picower Professor of Neuroscience at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and an Investigator at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT. Prof Tsai uses a multi-omic approach to decipher the pathophysiology of Alzheimer’s dementia (AD). Her team pioneered the use of patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) to produce various brain cell types and a novel 3D brain tissue model of AD pathology. She also pioneered the use of non-invasive sensory stimulation to treat AD and other neurological disorders. Tsai is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, a Member of the National Academy of Medicine, an Academician of the Academia Sinica in Taiwan, and a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a recipient of the Mika Salpeter Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2018 Hans Wigzell Research Foundation Science Prize for her research on Alzheimer’s disease, and 2025 Distinguished Lecturer for Parkinson’s Disease Research, Diana Helis Henry and Adrienne Helis Malvin Medical Research Foundations. In 2022 she was named a Visiting Professor of the Vallee Foundation.
Welcome Dinner · Sunday, October 4
Faculty, Utah State University, and co-author of Lifespan
Matthew D. LaPlante, PhD, teaches journalism, science communication, and climate adaptation science at Utah State University. He is the author of Superlative: The Biology of Extremes and the co-writer of Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don’t Have To with Dr. David Sinclair.
As a journalist, Matthew has covered insurgent warfare in the Middle East, gang violence in Central America, ritual infanticide in Africa, the legacy of genocide in Eastern Asia, and ecological collapse in North America for news organizations including CNN, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Daily News. He is the host of UnDisciplined, a program about research and discovery on Utah Public Radio. His journalistic work has been recognized with the Kavli Award for science journalism and the Ancil Payne Award for ethics in reporting.
Matthew’s scholarly efforts are focused on climate prediction, applied agriculture, and translational research. His work has been published in journals including Science Advances, Atmospheric Research, and Environmental Research Letters. He is the manager of an aspen syrup research farm in Brighton, Utah. In 2025, he was an Early Career Research recipient of the National Academies Schmidt Award for Science Communication.
Matthew’s latest hobby project was the first successful electric conversion of a 1969 Ford Mustang, turning the classic muscle car into an EV with a 0-to-60 time of under 4 seconds. He is also the co-owner of 1833, a zero-proof craft cocktail lounge in Salt Lake City serving the growing movement of people who are choosing to drink less alcohol.
Welcome Dinner · Sunday, October 4
Principal Investigator, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
Dr. Christoph Gorgulla is a Faculty Member and Principal Investigator in the Department of Structural Biology at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, where he leads the QAI4Bio (Quantum AI for Biology) Lab within the Center of Excellence for Data-Driven Discovery.
His mission is to transform how new medicines are discovered: faster, at lower cost, with better candidates that stand a higher chance of succeeding, and against targets long considered undruggable. His work bridges theory, implementation, and application, translating fundamental advances in artificial intelligence, quantum mechanics, and quantum computing into technologies for drug discovery and ultimately into experimentally validated molecules.
A central focus of his research is overcoming a longstanding tradeoff in computational drug discovery: the scale required to search the vast chemical space and the accuracy to predict molecular properties of interest. He is the creator of VirtualFlow and AdaptiveFlow, open-source platforms that computationally evaluate tens of billions of candidate molecules against disease-relevant proteins. His lab applies these approaches across biology, from the drivers of childhood cancer to the epigenetic regulators that govern how cells age.
Dr. Gorgulla’s training is highly interdisciplinary. He earned degrees in molecular biology with bioinformatics and in mathematics with quantum physics, followed by a PhD in quantum chemistry and computational drug discovery from Freie Universität Berlin, the Berlin Mathematical School, and the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics. He completed his postdoctoral training at Harvard University with Gerhard Wagner, Arthur Jaffe, and Haribabu Arthanari.
His work has appeared in Nature and Nature Biotechnology and has been supported by Google and Amazon Web Services. He has been a Google Cloud Champion Innovator and a Konrad-Zuse Fellow and has mentored more than 30 students and postdoctoral fellows.
Welcome Dinner · Sunday, October 4
President and Chief Scientific Officer, MetroBiotech
David serves as President and Chief Scientific Officer of MetroBiotech, a company developing therapeutics for treatment of diseases of aging and mitochondrial disorders. Prior to joining Metro, David held positions as Senior Vice President, Biology at Ensemble Therapeutics, a macrocycle chemistry company, President and CEO of Spherics, Inc., a drug delivery company, and President/CEO at Praelux Inc. (acquired by GE Healthcare), which invented a rapid confocal imaging platform for high-content cell assay-based drug discovery. Before leading Praelux, David was Vice President and Program Executive at Vertex Pharmaceuticals where he managed therapeutic programs in inflammation, immunology, and virology. David earned his PhD from the University of California at Davis and an MBA from Northeastern University in Boston. After his PhD, he pursued postdoctoral studies in enzymology (at M.I.T.) and in protein engineering (at The Johns Hopkins Medical School). David is an inventor on more than 40 granted US patents and has co-authored more than 60 peer-reviewed publications, and he is a visiting lecturer in Brown University’s Division of Biology and Medicine, where he teaches graduate students about drug discovery and the biology of aging.
HMS Symposium · Monday, October 5
Research Associate, Whitehead Institute and MIT
Yuancheng Ryan Lu is a K99 Research Associate at the Whitehead Institute and MIT, where he studies the genetic and epigenetic foundations of aging and its reversal, using the eye as a model system.
During his PhD with David Sinclair at Harvard, in collaboration with Zhigang He’s lab, Lu developed an AAV-based in vivo reprogramming approach that rejuvenated retinal neurons and restored visual function in models of aging and glaucoma (Lu, et al., Nature, 2020). This work helped establish age reversal as a tractable therapeutic concept and provided experimental support for the hypothesis that aging involves a reversible loss of epigenetic information (Lu, Tian, Sinclair, Nature Aging, 2023). The technology has since advanced to clinical translation by Life Biosciences, with a gene therapy based on this approach entering a Phase I clinical trial for age-related vision loss.
In his postdoctoral work with Jonathan Weissman and Bruce Ksander, Lu has integrated genome-scale perturbation screening with functional studies in aged animals to discover and engineer two novel rejuvenation factors capable of restoring age-related declines in vision and broader physiological function (Lu, et al., 2025; 2026). He also co-develops single-cell foundation models to design novel rejuvenation factors for human cells.
Ryan was named to the 2026 MIT Technology Review 35 Innovators Under 35 and selected as the year’s featured innovator for Biotechnology, recognizing his work toward developing new strategies to understand and reverse age-related functional decline.
HMS Symposium · Monday, October 5
PhD Candidate, Sinclair Lab, Harvard Medical School
Nalat Siwapornchai is a fifth-year PhD candidate and NSF Graduate Research Fellow in the Sinclair Lab at Harvard Medical School. She leads a project investigating what happens when cellular reprogramming is applied to cancer. Her work has shown that reprogramming can reduce tumor growth and shift colorectal cancer cells toward a more differentiated state. She uses single-cell genomics, chromatin profiling, drug screening, and mouse tumor models to understand how these responses arise and what they could mean for reprogramming-based therapies.
Before her doctoral training, Nalat studied biology and gerontology at UMass Boston. She then spent three years as a senior research technician at Tufts University, where she investigated age-related vulnerability to respiratory infections and contributed to several publications.
Outside the lab, Nalat served as Community Outreach Director for Harvard Science in the News, bringing research to audiences beyond academia. She was also a finalist in the Merck KGaA Innovation Cup and the Harvard-MIT Consulting Case Competition, working with interdisciplinary teams on challenges in therapeutic innovation and biotechnology strategy. She hopes to build a career connecting scientific discovery with better care for patients.
HMS Symposium · Monday, October 5
PhD Candidate, Sinclair Lab, Harvard Medical School
Chris Petty received his bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry & Molecular Biology and master’s degree in Biotechnology from Boston University, where he studied cellular responses to oxidative stress and the role of noncoding RNAs in regulating cell fate. He is now a PhD candidate in the Biological and Biomedical Sciences program at Harvard Medical School in the laboratory of David Sinclair.
Chris’s thesis research focuses on understanding and harnessing epigenetic restoration to reverse aging. His work has helped identify small-molecule reprogramming cocktails capable of reversing age-associated changes in cells, which he is now working to translate in vivo in aged and progeroid mice. In parallel, he is investigating the mechanism of how OSK reprogramming enables cells to recover youthful epigenetic information that becomes disrupted during aging.
Chris has received several honors, including the Beckman Scholar Award and Glenn Foundation Pilot Award, and has been an active mentor in the Sinclair Lab, training more than 20 high school, undergraduate, and master’s students.
HMS Symposium · Monday, October 5
Postdoctoral Fellow, Sinclair Lab, Harvard Medical School
Kelly received her master’s degree and board certification in Genetic Counseling from The Ohio State University, where she studied the genetic and clinical spectrum of inherited mutations in titinopathies. Immediately thereafter she pursued a PhD in Neuroscience also from The Ohio State University, where she studied molecular mechanisms of motor neuron diseases and developed viral-mediated gene therapies for them. Kelly then became interested in studying aging as a modifiable biomarker and therapeutic target, and received a 6-year training grant from the National Institute on Aging to support a transition to studying aging.
She brought that grant to the Sinclair lab, where today Kelly’s work spans the context of both disease and chronological age. Her projects include translating small molecules for modification of the aging process in living systems as well as manipulating existing reprogramming factors to create novel therapies for neurodegenerative diseases. Ultimately her work asks how epigenetic reprogramming shapes vulnerability and resilience. She has trained high school, undergraduate students, graduate students, and technicians during her time in the Sinclair Lab.
HMS Symposium · Monday, October 5
Founder and Chairman, XPRIZE
Peter Diamandis is the founder of over 28 companies in the areas of Longevity, AI, synthetic biology, space and education. He is cofounder of Singularity University and the Abundance Community. He serves as co-founder of two $700 million+ venture funds: BOLD, which focused on health, and LINK-Exponential Ventures focusing on AI.
He is the Founder and Chairman of XPRIZE which has launched $600 million of incentive prizes driving $30 billion in R&D. Notably he is the host of Moonshots, the #1 podcast in AI and Exponential tech.
Diamandis has been named by Fortune magazine as one of the “World’s 50 Greatest Leaders” and by Forbes as “One of America’s 250 greatest innovators”. He has degrees in molecular genetics and aerospace engineering from MIT and an MD from Harvard Medical School.
Diamandis is a New York Times Bestselling author of 6 books: Abundance, Bold, The Future Is Faster Than You Think, Life Force, Longevity Guidebook, and We Are as Gods. His favorite saying is, “The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself!”
HMS Symposium · Monday, October 5
Professor of Economics, University of Oxford
Andrew J. Scott CBE is Principal Scientist (Economics) at the Ellison Institute of Technology and Professor of Economics, Oxford University. He is also a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research and a co-founder of The Longevity Forum. He holds a PhD from Oxford University and previously held positions at London Business School, Harvard University, and the London School of Economics.
His research focuses on the economics of AI and Robotics, longevity and ageing. He is the author of The Longevity Imperative (2024) and the global best seller The Hundred Year Life (2016), both runners-up in the FT Business Book of the Year Award.
Scott has advised a range of corporations, governments and international organizations and his work is regularly featured in the media. His focus is how we adapt and adjust to achieve a longevity rather than an ageing society so that life isn’t just longer but healthier, productive and engaged for longer.
Gala Dinner · Monday, October 5
Professor of Medicine and Director of Aging Biology Research, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA
Steve Horvath, PhD, ScD, is a geroscientist whose research bridges biomarkers, precision medicine, genomics and comparative biology. He is Professor of Medicine and Director of Aging Biology Research in the Department of Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Trained in mathematics (PhD, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) and biostatistics (ScD, Harvard University), he is best known for epigenetic clocks: estimators of biological age based on DNA methylation. His work began with the first saliva-based epigenetic clock in 2011. In 2013 he developed the first multi-tissue clock, which estimates biological age across diverse human tissues and cell types. With colleagues he went on to develop second-generation clocks, such as PhenoAge and GrimAge, that predict disease and mortality risk. In 2023 the Mammalian Methylation Consortium, which he led, produced the universal pan-mammalian clock: a single mathematical formula that measures aging across mammalian species. His lab also developed weighted gene co-expression network analysis (WGCNA), a widely used method in systems biology. Today his research asks which methylation changes cause aging rather than merely track it, and how clocks can serve as endpoints in clinical trials of interventions that slow aging. He founded the non-profit Epigenetic Clock Development Foundation. His honors include the Nathan W. Shock Award, the Allen Distinguished Investigator Award and the 2026 Luminary Award of the Precision Medicine World Conference. He has been named on Clarivate’s annual list of the world’s most influential scientific researchers every year since 2018.
Gala Dinner · Monday, October 5
Chief Operating Officer, Life Biosciences
Dr. Michael Ringel is Chief Operating Officer at Life Biosciences, a company focused on epigenetic restoration to reverse diseases of aging. Prior to joining Life Bio, Michael was Managing Director and Senior Partner at BCG, where he worked for 25 years. He is on the Boards of Hevolution Foundation US, the largest charitable organization focused on extending healthy aging, and AFAR, the oldest organization supporting healthy aging through biomedical research, and is an Advisor to Sheba Longevity Center, a clinic devoted to healthy aging at one of the world’s best hospitals, as well as Applied Longevity Intelligence Service, the first AI-powered longevity co-pilot for physicians. Dr. Ringel holds a B.A. summa cum laude in biology from Princeton University, a PhD in biology from Imperial College, and a J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School.
Alumni Gathering · Tuesday, October 6
Professor and Vice Chair for Biomedical Research, Department of Medicine, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Dr. Dudley Lamming is Professor and Vice Chair for Biomedical Research in the Department of Medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he also serves as co-Director of the Wisconsin Nathan Shock Center of Excellence in the Basic Biology of Aging. He is Director of the UW-Madison Comprehensive Diabetes Center Mouse Phenotyping and Surgery Core and holds a research appointment at the William S. Middleton Memorial Veterans Hospital. Dr. Lamming received his PhD in Experimental Pathology from Harvard University in 2008 after completing his thesis research in the laboratory of Dr. David Sinclair, and subsequently completed postdoctoral training at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. His research there helped establish that many of the deleterious side effects of rapamycin, a drug that extends lifespan by inhibiting the protein kinase mTORC1, were mediated by “off-target” inhibition of a second complex, mTORC2. This work helped reshape our understanding of how rapamycin acts in vivo and has informed subsequent efforts to develop mTOR-targeted interventions for aging and age-related disease. Dr. Lamming is the author of over 100 peer-reviewed papers and has received numerous honors, including the 2018 Nathan Shock New Investigator Award from the Gerontological Society of America. He is a Fellow of both the American Aging Association and the Gerontological Society of America, and served as President of the American Aging Association from 2023-2024. His NIH-supported laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studies how nutrients and dietary composition regulate the molecular pathways that control aging and age-related disease. His lab has a particular interest in how altering specific dietary amino acids and other macronutrients can promote healthy aging and extend lifespan, and be used to prevent or treat age-associated diseases, including diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease.
Alumni Gathering · Tuesday, October 6
Professor of Physiology, University of Pennsylvania
Joseph Baur, PhD, is a Professor in the Department of Physiology and the Institute for Diabetes, Obesity, and Metabolism at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. His laboratory studies the basic mechanisms that lead to aging, and how these can be influenced by nutritional or pharmacological interventions. He has published more than 160 papers, spanning topics in aging from the cellular level to whole organisms. Dr. Baur’s work has contributed to our understanding of telomere biology, the actions of resveratrol and sirtuin enzymes, and mechanisms of action for rapamycin, the most robustly validated longevity drug in mice. He is a leader in the field of nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD) metabolism and has developed mouse models and heavy isotope tracing methods adopted by many researchers in this area, in addition to co-discovering SLC25A51 as the mitochondrial NAD transporter. This work has provided critical insights in the mechanisms of action for nicotinamide riboside and nicotinamide mononucleotide, which are now widely consumed as supplements. Recent work in the lab is focused on strategies to maintain muscle mass and metabolic health during weight loss induced by GLP-1 agonism. Dr. Baur’s broad goal is to identify molecular mechanisms that are amenable to nutritional or pharmacological manipulation and can be translated into therapies to prevent or treat age-related diseases in humans.
Alumni Gathering · Tuesday, October 6
Associate Professor, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine
Dr. Oberdoerffer is an Associate Professor of Radiation Oncology and Molecular Radiation Sciences at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He received his PhD in mouse genetics and immunology from the University of Cologne, Germany, and went on to pursue studies on the molecular biology of aging as a postdoc at Harvard Medical School. Prior to joining Johns Hopkins Medicine, Dr. Oberdoerffer directed a research laboratory at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), where he last served as a program director for DNA replication and genome instability in the Division of Cancer Biology (DCB) and co-led the NCI Moonshot Human Tumor Atlas Network (HTAN).
The Oberdoerffer lab uses a combination of molecular biology, epigenetics, imaging and mouse genetics to investigate how epigenetic context can be manipulated to alter DNA repair pathways in health and disease. His work has been recognized by the NCI Director’s Innovation Award, the Basser Center for BRCA, a Department of Defense Breast Cancer Research Program Breakthrough Award, and a JHU Future Forward Award. He is Editor-in-Chief for Chromosome Research.
Alumni Gathering · Tuesday, October 6
Scientia Fellow, UNSW Sydney
A/Prof Lindsay Wu is a Scientia Fellow at UNSW Sydney where he leads the Laboratory for Ageing Research, which focuses on age-related changes in cellular metabolism as a target for improving healthy lifespan. The lab uses stable isotope tracing to uncover new aspects of old metabolic pathways such as NAD+, and applies this to translational models, resulting in ongoing clinical trials in patients. Lindsay has previously been supported by fellowships from Hevolution / American Federation for Aging Research (AFAR), the NHMRC of Australia and Cancer Institute NSW. He is also a cofounder of MetroBiotech and Jumpstart Fertility, and played key roles at Life Biosciences, Liberty Biosecurity and currently at an Australian biotech firm, Proto Axiom.
Alumni Gathering · Tuesday, October 6
Postdoctoral Fellow, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
Dr. Patrick Griffin is a postdoctoral fellow in Jason Buenrostro’s lab at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and the Harvard Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology. His current research bridges endocrinology and genomics technology. He studies how chronic psychosocial stress remodels endocrine tissues using single-cell multiomics, and he develops new platforms for single-cell epigenomic profiling. A central theme across his work is understanding how stress and our environment shape how we age.
He completed his PhD with David Sinclair in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, where he invented TIME-seq, a high-throughput method for epigenetic age profiling (Griffin et al., Nature Aging 2024), and built the first multiomic aging clocks in mice (Vera*, Griffin* et al., J Gerontol A 2025), contributing to work showing that loss of epigenetic information drives mammalian aging (Yang, Hayano, Griffin et al., Cell 2023).
Alumni Gathering · Tuesday, October 6
Assistant Professor, Sanford Burnham Prebys
Xiao Tian is an Assistant Professor in the Center for Neurologic Diseases and the Cancer Genome and Epigenetics Program at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute. He opened the Tian lab in January 2024 to understand the fundamental biology of aging and its contribution to age-related diseases. He joined SBP after his postdoctoral training in Dr. David Sinclair’s lab at Harvard Medical School, where he co-wrote the Information Theory of Aging. He obtained his PhD from the University of Rochester, where he worked with Dr. Vera Gorbunova to understand the molecular mechanisms underlying longevity and cancer resistance in long-lived species. His work includes identifying the first anti-cancer and longevity mechanism of naked mole rats, high-molecular-mass hyaluronan (Tian et al., Nature 2013), and discovering that DNA double-strand break repair is a molecular basis of exceptional longevity (Tian et al., Cell 2019). In his own lab, he aims to understand the epigenetic causes of aging and how physiological aging transitions to pathological aging. At the celebration, he will present his work on brain reprogramming.
Alumni Gathering · Tuesday, October 6
Chief Scientific Officer, Life Biosciences
Dr. Sharon Rosenzweig‑Lipson is Chief Scientific Officer at Life Biosciences and brings more than 30 years of leadership experience across both large pharmaceutical companies and biotechnology firms. She has successfully advanced therapeutic programs from early discovery through Phase 2B clinical development. Her pharmaceutical career includes leadership roles at American Cyanamid, American Home Products, Wyeth, and Pfizer, where she led a team that achieved a successful Phase 2 proof-of-concept study and served as site head of the Princeton research facility. As Vice President of R&D at AgeneBio, she directed the development of the company’s lead asset through Phase 2B clinical trials and oversaw its preclinical discovery programs. Recognized globally for her scientific and strategic leadership, Dr. Rosenzweig‑Lipson has led translational research alliances and built high-performing, cross-functional teams focused on evidence-based decision-making. She holds a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD in behavioral neuroscience from Harvard University.
