About the Scientists

Troy Duster Ph.D., is Professor of Sociology at New York University and Chancellor's Professor at the University of California, Berkeley.  He publishes widely across the fields of the sociology of law, science, deviance, inequality, race and education.  He shattered conceived notions of ethnicity in genetic research by raising the issue of race identification at the DNA level. His work proves that race continues to matter, biologically and socially. As a public intellectual, he serves on committees for the National Academy of Sciences, the National Science Foundation, and the Legal and Social Issues Committee of the Human Genome Project. In 1970, his first book, The Legislation of Morality: Drugs, Crime, and Law became a classic in the drug field.  He is co-author of Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society (2003), which won the Benjamin Hooks Award and was a finalist for the C. Wright Mills Award in 2004. Among his other awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship at the London School of Economics; an honorary Doctor of Letters from Williams College; and the Dubois-Johnson-Frazier Award from the American Sociological Association.  Dr. Duster received his Ph.D. from Northwestern University.

 Aubrey de Grey, Ph.D., is a biomedical gerontologist; the chief science officer of SENS Foundation, a non-profit charity dedicated to combating the aging process; and editor-in-chief of Rejuvenation Research. He received his BA and Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 1985 and 2000 respectively. His original field was computer science, and he did research in the private sector for six years in the area of software verification, before switching to biogerontology in the mid-1990s. His research interests encompass the causes of all the accumulating and eventually pathogenic molecular and cellular side-effects of metabolism (“damage”) that constitute mammalian aging, and the design of interventions to repair and/or obviate that damage. He has developed a possibly comprehensive plan for such repair, termed Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS), which breaks aging down into seven major classes of damage and identifies detailed approaches to addressing each one. A key aspect of SENS is that it can potentially extend healthy lifespan without limit, even though these repair processes will probably never be perfect, as the repair only needs to approach perfection rapidly enough to keep the overall level of damage below pathogenic levels. Dr. de Grey has termed this required rate of improvement of repair therapies “longevity escape velocity”. Dr. de Grey is a Fellow of both the Gerontological Society of America and the American Aging Association, and sits on the editorial and scientific advisory boards of numerous journals and organizations.

 Leonard P. Guarente, Ph.D., is a molecular biologist; Novartis Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and director of the Paul F. Glenn Lab for Science of Aging. He trained as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard with Mark Ptashne and has been on the faculty of MIT since 1981. His lab identified SIR2 as the key gene regulating life span in yeast and C. elegans, and is well known for its work within the area of longevity. He is the author of over 100 scientific articles and the book Ageless Quest: One Scientist's Search for Genes That Prolong Youth. He is on the editorial board of Cell, EMBO Reports, Developmental Cell, Genes & Development, Aging, Trends in Genetics, and Experimental Gerontology, and is a member of the French Academie des Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Academy of the American Society for Healthy Aging Investigator and American Academy of Microbiology.

 Cynthia Kenyon, Ph.D., is a geneticists, the American Cancer Society Research Professor, Biochemistry and Biophysics, at the University of California-San Francisco; and director of the UCSF Hillblom Center for the Biology of Aging. She graduated valedictorian in chemistry and biochemistry from the University of Georgia in 1976, and received her PhD from MIT in 1981, where, in Graham Walker’s laboratory, she was the first to look for genes on the basis of their expression profiles, discovering that DNA damaging agents activate a battery of DNA repair genes in E. coli. She then did postdoctoral studies with Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, studying the development of C. elegans. Since 1986 she has been at the University of California, San Francisco. In 1993, Kenyon and colleagues’ discovery that a single-gene mutation could double the lifespan of C. elegans sparked an intensive study of the molecular biology of aging. These findings have now led to the discovery that an evolutionarily conserved hormone signaling system controls aging in other organisms as well, including mammals. Dr. Kenyon has received many honors and awards for her findings.  She is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Institute of Medicine and she is a past president of the Genetics Society of America.

 Dr. Thomas Kirkwood is Professor of Medicine and Director of the Institute for Aging and Health at Newcastle University. His research is on the basic science of aging and how genes as well as non-genetic factors, such as nutrition, influence health in old age. He led the UK Foresight Task Force on ‘Healthcare and Older People’ in 1995, and the 2008 Foresight project on ‘Mental Capital Through Life’, was Specialist Adviser to the 2005 House of Lords Science & Technology Select Committee inquiry into ‘Aging: Scientific Aspects’ and has served on the Councils of the UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and Academy of Medical Sciences. His books include the award-winning ‘Time of Our Lives: The Science of Human Aging’, ‘Chance, Development and Aging’ (with Caleb Finch) and ‘The End of Age’ based on his BBC Reith Lectures in 2001. He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE)  in 2009.

 Gordon Lithgow, Ph.D., is a biomolecular geneticist; and head of the Lithgow Lab at the Buck Institute for Age Research. Dr. Lithgow coined the term Geroscience, which is a new scientific discipline focused at the intersection of normal aging and chronic disease. The program, covered in Nature, is funded with a prestigious National Institutes of Health “Roadmap” grant. Lithgow’s lab focuses on the relationship between stress and aging by studying genes that effect lifespan and an animal’s ability to resist stress. One of the most striking discoveries to come out of the Lithgow lab involves a study appearing in Science, which revealed that proteins that prevent cancer in humans also determine lifespan in the nematode worm C. elegans. In 1996, Lithgow and colleague Dr Tom Kirkwood wrote a paper for Science,  on the "Mechanisms and Evolution of Aging", that helped make a paradigm shift away from conventional assumptions about aging. In 2000, Lithgow and Buck colleague Simon Melov, reported the first successful use of drugs to extend lifespan in an animal. The ground-breaking study, published in Science, involved the use of antioxidants and the nematode worm, C. elegans.

 David Sinclair, Ph.D., is director of the Paul F. Glenn Laboratories for the Biological Mechanisms of Aging at Harvard Medical School; Professor of Pathology, and a Senior Scholar of the Ellison Medical Foundation. He has a Bachelors of Science and a Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics from the University of New South Wales, Sydney. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher at M.I.T. with Leonard Guarente, Ph.D., where he discovered a cause of aging for yeast and genes that control the aging process. He was recruited to Harvard Medical School in 1999 and was promoted to professor in 2008. In 2004, he co-founded Sirtris Pharmaceuticals to treat age-associated diseases such as diabetes, neurodegenerative diseases, and cancer. In 2006, he co-founded Genocea Biosciences, a vaccine discovery and development company, to prevent and treat infectious diseases in developed and developing countries. Dr. Sinclair has received awards including The Australian Commonwealth Prize, a Helen Hay Whitney Postdoctoral Award, a Leukemia Society Fellowship, a Ludwig Scholarship, a Harvard-Armenise Fellowship, an American Association for Aging Research Fellowship, and a Fellowship and Senior Scholarship from the Ellison Medical Foundation. He won the Genzyme Outstanding Achievement in Biomedical Science Award (2005) and a "Bio-Innovator award" (2006).
 

 Christoph Westphal, Ph.D., co-founded Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, Inc. in 2004 and has since served as Chief Executive Officer. In addition to leading Sirtris as an independent discovery performance unit within GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Dr. Westphal serves as the Senior Vice President of GSK’s Centre of Excellence for External Drug Discovery (CEEDD). At the CEEDD, Dr. Westphal and his team are developing a network of external alliances with world-class biotech companies to bring breakthrough medicines into the GSK pipeline. Dr. Westphal is based at Sirtris, which is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Dr. Westphal also serves as the Scientific Advisory Board Chair for the Healthy Lifespan Institute, and serves on the Board of Directors for Alnara Pharmaceuticals, Inc., the Board of Fellows of Harvard Medical School and the Board of Overseers of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Dr. Westphal has been the lead or senior author on several patent applications and scientific papers in journals, including Cell, Nature and Nature Genetics.

Dr. Irina Conboy is a professor in the department of bioengineering at Berkeley. She met her husband Michael Conboy at Harvard, and received her PhD at Stanford University, studying molecular and cellular immunology. Their latest research involves the dilution of blood plasma, which has the effect of reversing aspects of organ aging.

Dr. Conboy is a “true scientist” in terms of her questioning the latest “Breakthrough” or data set, which is often accompanied by heated mainstream media reports. Originally involved in the initial experiments at Stanford, wherein the blood systems of young and old mice were connected, she dutifully tested and questioned the results;  and to this day, is at the absolute forefront in the understanding that aging is a more dynamic process then initially thought.

She was to be the featured speaker at David Sinclair’s yearly aging symposium at Harvard Medical School when COVID struck. Having interviewed many of the top scientists in the field of aging research since 2007, the director of the film “To Age or not To Age” - Robert Kane Pappas - considers Dr. Conboy, without a doubt, to be one of the most insightful researchers in this field.