The nematode C. elegans has proven to be an invaluable model organism for identifying mechanisms that influence longevity, and may be conserved across species. Recently considerable interest has been focused on how aging is influenced by the target of rapamycin (TOR) signaling pathway. TOR is an enzyme that regulates numerous proteins...
Senior and New Scholars Awards for Harvard Medical School
Dr. T. Keith Blackwell
Joslin Diabetes Center, Harvard Medical School
2010 senior Scholar Award in aging
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Dr. Konstantin Khrapko
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School
2010 senior Scholar Award in aging
The role of mtDNA mutations in the aging process has been debatable for decades since Harmanís seminal work on mitochondria, oxidative stress and aging. Currently more than ever the field is plentiful in evidence both in favor and against an involvement of mtDNA mutations in aging, which have led recently to much controversy. For example,...
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Dr. Zoltan Arany
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School
2010 new Scholar Award in aging
Ischemic disease of heart, brain, or limbs is almost a sine qua non of advanced age. Most people in the developed world eventually die from ischemic causes. Ischemic tissues can create new blood vessels (angiogenesis), in an attempt to recruit more oxygen and nutrients. That response, however, declines profoundly with age. Why this is so remains...
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Dr. Ji-Hye Paik
Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School
2010 new Scholar Award in aging
The mammalian brain maintains the ability to generate new neurons in the face of advancing aging and injury. This regenerative capacity derives from resident stem cells and their depletion may be responsible for cognitive decline during aging. Uncovering the molecular mechanism for neural stem cell regulation and their restorative functions...
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Dr. Ronald A. DePinho
Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School
2003 senior Scholar Award in aging
Telomeres are specialized capping structures on chromosomes that play important roles in aging, cancer and genome stability. Normal cells do not possess the specialized enzyme telomerase that functions to synthesize and maintain telomere length with each cell division. Thus, cell division is associated with progressive telomere shortening and... |
Dr. Ary L. Goldberger
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School
2005 senior Scholar Award in aging
Time asymmetry (irreversibility), also referred to as the ìarrow of time,î is a fundamental property of systems that operate far from equilibrium. The emergence of such nonequilibrium dynamics-- essential for life--requires the expenditure of energy and leads to irreversible changes.
Up to the present, quantifying the time... |
Dr. Alfred L. Goldberg
Harvard Medical School
2004 senior Scholar Award in aging
The goal of these studies is to clarify the molecular mechanisms for two prominent features of aged organisms: 1) the accumulation of abnormal proteins in cells, and 2) the marked, debilitating loss of muscle mass (sarcopenia). To understand these phenomena, we shall build upon recent advances in knowledge about the mechanisms and regulation... |
Dr. Hong Yan
Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School
1998 new Scholar Award in aging
Werner syndrome (WS) is a rare genetic disorder associated with premature aging and increased risks for cancer. The gene underlining WS has been cloned and found to encode a member of the RecQ DNA helicase family. In addition to the drastic mutations found in WS patients, there are also mutations with unknown consequences in the general... |
Dr. Thomas M. Roberts
Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School
2008 senior Scholar Award in aging
Our laboratory works with an enzyme called PI3 kinase (PI3K). This enzyme has a long history, having first been discovered in the 1980s due to its role in cancer. We now know that PI3K plays a number of important roles in individual cells and in the physiology of the whole organism. For instance when a cell is treated with a growth factor, PI3K...
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Dr. Mel B. Feany
Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School
2006 senior Scholar Award in aging
There have recently been many exciting advances in research aimed at understanding and ultimately curing devastating neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. In particular, the explosion of molecular genetic technology has led to the identification of genes that are critical in familial forms of the... |
Dr. Charles M. Lieber
Harvard Medical School
2000 senior Scholar Award in aging
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is characterized by loss of memory and decreased intellectual function, which result from the loss of function of nerve cells in the brain. Cortical amyloid plaques comprising fibrillar deposits of the amyloid beta [Aβ] proteins Aβ40 and Aβ42 are a defining pathological feature of Alzheimer's disease (AD... |
Dr. George Church
Harvard Medical School
2008 senior Scholar Award in aging
Naked mole-rats can live over 28 years, significantly longer than similar-sized rodents like mice that do not commonly live more than 4 years. Naked mole-rats also appear to be very resistant to neoplasia. Because of these marked differences in longevity and age-related phenotypes between such similar species, genomic comparisons between them may...
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Dr. David A. Sinclair
Harvard Medical School
2007 senior Scholar Award in aging
For over 70 years it has been known that animals such as mice and monkeys have internal defense systems that fend off common diseases such as cancer, diabetes, heart disease and neurodegeneration. In the past five years researchers have discovered genes that underlie the CR response but this is likely to be the tip of the iceberg. A challenge of...
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Dr. Louis Kunkel
Harvard Medical School
1998 senior Scholar Award in aging
Three human families with clusters of extremely long-lived individuals will be analyzed in order to identify specific genes responsible for extreme longevity. |
Dr. Gary Ruvkun
Harvard Medical School
1998 senior Scholar Award in aging
Dr. Ruvkun has previously shown that an insulin-like signaling pathway regulates
longevity and metabolism in C. elegans. The most important output of this
pathway in C. elegans is the transcription factor DAF-16. Dr. Ruvkun now
proposes to search for the downstream targets of DAF-16 in order to identify the
downstream daf-16 genes...
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Dr. Shuji Kishi
Schepens Eye Research Institute, Harvard Medical School
2003 new Scholar Award in aging
Zebrafish (Danio rerio) offer a number of advantages for studying biological and biomedical science. Because embryonic development is external to the mother and the embryos are transparent, zebrafish were initially used as a model system for developmental biology. Recently, zebrafish have become a useful organism for research on a number of...
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Dr. David A. Sinclair
Harvard Medical School
2001 new Scholar Award in aging
Belying the complexity of the aging process, relatively minor changes to the
environment or genetic make-up of an organism can dramatically slow the rate
at which it ages. The question thus arises: How can seemingly simple changes
have such profound effects on aging? Recent findings suggest that the pace of
aging is actually governed by a...
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Dr. Danesh Moazed
Harvard Medical School
1999 new Scholar Award in aging
Chromosomes, the carriers of the cell's genetic information, are composed of distinct functional domains that ensure their fateful inheritance during the process of cell division and chromosome duplication. One example of such functional organization is the presence of large stretches of DNA which are packaged into a repressed state where gene...
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Dr. Bruce M. Spiegelman
Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School
2006 senior Scholar Award in aging
Cellular energy is derived ultimately from the food we ingest. In order to be useful to the cell, food components such as proteins, lipids, and carbohydrates are eventually broken down into molecule-sized components. Through the process of "glycolysis," an individual cell converts carbohydrate molecules into a form of chemical energy, referred to...
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Dr. Claude P. Lechene
Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School
2008 senior Scholar Award in aging
An emerging theory is that aging-related changes might be, at least in part, due to a decline in the number or function of tissue stem cells. Thus, understanding cell regeneration during aging is an important goal. As an example, many experimental findings suggest that the heart has a population of resident cardiac stem cells that have the... |
Dr. C. Ronald Kahn
Joslin Diabetes Center, Harvard Medical School
2007 senior Scholar Award in aging
While many factors contribute to longevity, studies over the last decade have revealed particularly important roles for the activity of the insulin and IGF-1 signaling systems. Indeed, these signaling systems have been shown to play a role in control of lifespan in organisms as diverse as worms, flies, mice and humans. These are the same...
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Dr. Marcia Haigis
Harvard Medical School
2009 new Scholar Award in aging
Fat metabolism becomes imbalanced during aging and contributes, at least in part, to the increased adiposity and tissue dysfunction observed in the elderly. We have identified mitochondrial SIRT4, one of the least studied members of the Sir2 lifespan regulator gene family, as a new modulator of age-dependant fatty acid storage, raising the...
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Dr. Junying Yuan
Harvard Medical School
2009 senior Scholar Award in aging
This proposal is to study the role of RIP1 kinase and its signaling pathway in mediating production of an important pro-inflammatory cytokine, TNFα, and its implication in aging. Increased levels of TNFα during aging are detrimental for longevity by contributing to the pathogenesis of multiple aging related illness including...
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Dr. David Q.H. Wang
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School
1999 new Scholar Award in aging
Cholesterol gallstone disease occurs rarely in childhood and adolescence. As epidemiological observations have suggested and as clinical studies have confirmed, the prevalence of cholesterol gallstone disease increases linearly with advancing age and approaches 50% at age 80. Elderly individuals are at high risk for developing gallstone... |
Dr. Bruce A. Yankner
Harvard Medical School
2005 senior Scholar Award in aging
Over the past 15 years, my laboratory has contributed to our understanding of mechanisms of neurodegeneration in Alzheimer's disease. However, a major gap in our understanding of human neurodegenerative diseases is their relationship to normal brain aging. To achieve a greater understanding of the biology of normal brain aging, we provided the...
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Dr. Francine Grodstein
Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School
1998 new Scholar Award in aging
In the US, 5% of women over age 60, and 28% over 85 may have dementia. While advances have been made recently to delay Alzheimer's disease progression, little population-based research is aimed at studying the earliest stages of cognitive decline in healthy elderly, a stage which might be most susceptible to intervention. Experimental studies... |
Dr. Roberto G. Kolter
Harvard Medical School
2002 senior Scholar Award in gid
Most bacteria that exist on our planet do not cause diseases to humans. By and large these bacteria colonize diverse environments and carry out important processes in their habitats. Such processes are generally beneficial to humans. For example, only bacteria have the capacity to take the nitrogen that is abundant in the atmosphere, but which... |
Dr. Jon Clardy
Harvard Medical School
2001 senior Scholar Award in gid
Cultured soil microbes provide many of our most important drugs including the antibiotics erythromycin and vancomycin, the immunosuppressive drugs FK506 and rapamycin, and the anticancer agents mitomycin C and actinomycin D, among many others. Culturing soil microbes is still a useful way to discover new medicinal agents, but rediscovery rates... |
Funded Institutions
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The Ellison Medical Foundation