http://healthyaging.ku.dk
https://icmm.ku.dk/english/research-groups/juel-rasmussen-group/

Lene Juel Rasmussen is Professor at the University of Copenhagen and Executive Director of the interdisciplinary aging center, Center for Healthy Aging, residing within the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences. Her research aims to unravel the complex molecular basics of aging and the development of aging associated diseases. Within this context, her research group focuses on the molecular understanding of mitochondrial dysfunction and how cells achieve to preserve mitochondrial and nuclear DNA integrity as well as DNA repair.

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). Since 2023, Schumacher is speaker of the DFG Research Unit FOR 5504 on “Physiological causes and consequences of genome instability”. 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) grant, coordinated the FP7 Marie Curie initial training network on chronic DNA damage in ageing (CodeAge) and served 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.

Dr. von Zglinicki is a founding member of the basic biology branch of the Newcastle Ageing Institute and was its scientific director from 2014 to 2019. His principal research interest is in understanding the cellular and molecular signaling pathways connecting DNA damage responses (specifically emanating from dysfunctional telomeres) with mitochondrial function and metabolism, thus causing and maintaining cell senescence, and how these contribute to mammalian ageing. He was the first to discover oxidative stress and resulting DNA damage as a major cause of telomere shortening and to propose telomere length as a biomarker of ageing in humans. He found that senescent cells induce senescence in bystander cells, which might explain the long-term physiological and pathological consequences of short-term senescence-inducing treatments. He aims to prolong healthy lifespan in mammals and ultimately humans by interventions that selectively ablate senescent cells and/or suppress bystander signaling. In 2017 he received the Lord Cohen of Birkenhead Medal for Services to Gerontology. He published about 300 papers on cell and molecular biology of ageing, resulting in an h-index of 93 (Google Scholar June 2023).

Manuel Santos is Professor of Genetics at the Faculty of Medicine and serves as the Scientific Director of the Multidisciplinary Institute of Ageing (MIA-Portugal) at the University of Coimbra-Portugal. He has played pivotal roles in various institutions. Notably, he was the founding Director of the Institute of Biomedicine (iBiMED, www.ua.pt/ibimed) from 2014 to 2022, and also served as the founding director of the Department of Medical Sciences at the University of Aveiro from 2014 to 2020. He is also the Founding Coordinator of the Portuguese Genome Sequencing Consortium (https://www.genomept.pt) and Vice-President of the Portuguese Genetics Society (SPG), he has been instrumental in fostering advancements in genetic research and its practical applications. His body of work includes the publication of over 140 papers and he has been nominated for an EMBO Young Investigator Award in 2004.

In his research, Manuel Santos focuses on the intricate mechanisms of protein synthesis control and its profound impact on ageing and human health. He is particularly fascinated by the role of translational fidelity in maintaining the stability of the proteome and genome. Through his investigations, he aims to shed light on how errors in protein synthesis can lead to genome instability, thereby influencing the ageing process and the evolution of tumours. He research has been funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), the Human frontier Science program (HFSP), EMBO and the Wellcome Trust.

James L. Kirkland, M.D., Ph.D., is the Noaber Foundation Professor of Aging Research at Mayo Clinic. Dr. Kirkland's research is on the contribution of fundamental aging processes, particularly cellular senescence, to age-related and chronic diseases and development of agents and strategies for targeting fundamental aging mechanisms to treat age- and chronic disease-related conditions. Additional research areas include molecular and physiological mechanisms of age-related adipose tissue and metabolic dysfunction, frailty, and loss of resilience to infections and acute diseases in old age. Dr. Kirkland's laboratory published the first article about agents that selectively eliminate senescent cells - senolytic drugs. Dr. Kirkland demonstrated that senolytic agents enhance healthspan and delay, prevent, or alleviate multiple age-related disorders and diseases in mouse models. He published the first composite biomarker score of senescent cell burden that is sensitive to drug interventions in humans and the first clinical trials of senolytic drugs. He is preparing or conducting clinical studies of senolytics, including for COVID-19, frailty in elderly women, Alzheimer's disease, diabetes/obesity, osteoporosis, childhood cancer survivors, restoring function of organs from old donors to enable transplantation, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, pre-eclampsia, and others. He has more than 270 publications and holds over 80 patents. Dr. Kirkland is Principal Investigator of the Translational Geroscience Network (R33 AG061456), which brings together 8 academic institutions to translate healthspan interventions, including senolytics and other drugs that target fundamental aging processes, from bench to bedside. He has been a scientific advisory board member for several companies and academic organizations. He is President of the American Federation for Aging Research, a past member of the National Advisory Council on Aging of the National Institutes of Health, past chair of the Biological Sciences Section of the Gerontological Society of America, and past member of the Clinical Trials Advisory Panel of the National Institute on Aging. He is a board-certified specialist in internal medicine, geriatrics, and endocrinology and metabolism. Dr. Kirkland is the 2020 recipient of the Irving S. Wright Award of Distinction from the American Federation for Aging Research.

Miles Witham is Professor of Trials for Older People in the AGE Research Group at Newcastle University. He co-leads the Ageing, Sarcopenia and Multimorbidity Theme in the NIHR Newcastle Biomedical Research Centre and co-leads the ART of Healthy Ageing interdisciplinary Network to promote translational ageing research. He works clinically as an honorary Consultant Geriatrician at Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals Foundation NHS Trust. His research focusses on early and later phase clinical trials for people with sarcopenia and with multiple long-term conditions, and on the use of routinely-collected health and social care data to facilitate research on ageing and multiple long-term conditions. He was National Speciality Lead for Ageing in the NIHR Clinical Research Network Ageing speciality from 2019-2022, co-director of the Tayside Clinical Trials Unit from 2015 to 2018, and has a longstanding interest in improving inclusion of under-served groups (including older people) in clinical research.

Laura Niedernhofer joined the University of Minnesota in July 2018 to direct the new Institute on the Biology of Aging & Metabolism (iBAM) and Medical Discovery Team on the Biology of Aging. She is also a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and Biophysics at UMN. Dr. Niedernhofer's expertise is in DNA damage and repair, genome instability disorders, cellular senescence and aging. Her research program is centered on studying fundamental mechanisms of aging and developing therapeutics to target them. Her research program implements a murine model of a human progeroid syndrome caused by a defect in DNA repair. She contributed to the discovery of a new class of drugs called senolytics. Laura has served on study section for NCI, NIEHS and NIA. She has been awarded for research in aging, cancer and environmental health science.

Dr. Robbins received his B.A. from Haverford College, his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley and then worked as a post-doctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Richard Mulligan at the Whitehead Institute at MIT. He was an Assistant, Associate and then full Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine as well as Director of Basic Research for the Molecular Medicine Institute and Co-Director of the Paul Wellstone Cooperative Muscular Research Center. He then was a Professor of Molecular Medicine at Scripps Research in Jupiter, Florida and Director of the Center on Aging. He currently is a Professor of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and Biophysics and Associate Director of the Institute on the Biology of Aging and Metabolism at the University of Minnesota. His current research is focused on developing therapeutic approaches to extend healthspan including senotherapeutics. He has co-authored more than 360 peer-reviewed manuscripts and 210 book chapters and reviews with an H-index of 136, i10-index of 495 and ~73,000 citations and has edited four books.

Morten Scheibye-Knudsen did his medical training at the University of Copenhagen including a short scholarship investigating mitochondrial physiology. During medical school he founded his first company, Forsoegsperson.dk, which has grown to be the largest provider of volunteers for clinical trials in Denmark. After medical school he worked as a medical doctor in Denmark and Greenland before moving to basic science as a post doctoral fellow at the National Institute on Aging, NIH, in Baltimore. Here, he utilized computational and wet lab science to investigate how DNA damage contributes to the complex phenotypes seen in premature and normal aging. In 2016 he returned to Copenhagen as an assistant professor to start his own research program focusing on aging. In 2018, he received tenure and was promoted to associate professor. His team (~20 people) utilizes computational science, animal models, gene editing, and high-throughput approaches such as high-content microscopy and omics investigations to understand the molecular basis of aging and age-associated phenotypes. Lab generated data is routinely analyzed through AI-assisted pipelines such as novel cellular senescence classifiers and fully automated animal tracking (www.tracked.bio). He has published his work in some of the best journals in the world including Cell, Cell Metabolism, Nature Aging, New England Journal of Medicine and many others. In addition to his core research, he has been lecturing at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health for 8 years; He is a chief editor at Frontiers in Aging running the Aging Interventions section; He organizes the largest annual conference on Aging Research and Drug discovery (www.agingpharma.org); He is an advisor to Deep Longevity, the Longevity Vision Fund and Ars Salus; He has given invited presentations at top institutions (NIH, MIT, Harvard, NUS, Karolinska and others); and received several awards for his research.

Ageing and major chronic diseases are associated with an accumulation of damage to our DNA. Accordingly, hereditary diseases displaying premature/accelerated aging are most often caused by defects in various DNA repair processes. In this lecture, I will elucidate our work utilising computational approaches, wet lab analysis, animal models and clinical trials to understanding how DNA damage leads to diseases and what we can do to attenuate the consequence of damage to our genome allowing everyone longer and healthier lives.

Dr. Andreas Mund is a respected associate professor at the University of Copenhagen and an expert in the world of bio-tech. His interdisciplinary education in virology, cell biology, and biotechnological processes has fueled his work at the intersection of biology and technology. Leading a remarkable team, Dr. Mund has pioneered the development of Deep Visual Proteomics, a cutting-edge approach combining AI, laser microdissection, and mass spectrometry. This innovative method enables the study of proteins at an unprecedented detail and has the potential to revolutionize clinical applications by identifying disease biomarkers at single-cell resolution. His significant contributions have not gone unnoticed. Dr. Mund is a co-recipient of the esteemed CPR Technology Award 2021 and two Chan Zuckerberg Initiative - Seed Networks Awards. Follow him on Twitter @MundAndreas and @labs_mann to stay updated on his innovative research.

Dr Gavin Richardson, Ph. D is a Senior Lecturer and lead of the Vascular Medicine and Biology Theme, Biosciences Institute, Newcastle University. He obtained his PhD in Stem Cell Biology in Newcastle in 2004 and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Durham University studying skin dermal stem cells and skin ageing. During his career, Gavin has worked in institutions including Columbia and Harvard Universities as a visiting Fellow. His research aims to understand how senescence contributes to the pathophysiology of cardiovascular disease with a focus on senescence-associated inflammation and maladaptive myocardial remodelling. The goal of Dr Richardson's current work is to characterise the cardiac senescence signature to identify novel biomarkers and develop new therapies, targeting senescence, to improve cardiovascular health.

Marco Demaria is currently the Director of the Institute of Mechanisms of Health and Disease and Adjunct Professor in Cellular Ageing at the Medical Faculty of the University of Groningen, and the Group Leader of the laboratory of Cellular Senescence and Age-related Pathologies of the European Research Institute for the Biology of ageing (ERIBA). He obtained his PhD at the University of Torino, Italy, under the supervision of prof. Valeria Poli. In 2010, he joined the laboratory of prof. Judith Campisi as a postdoctoral fellow at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Novato, USA. In 2015, Dr. Demaria returned to Europe and joined the University of Groningen and the European Research Institute for the Biology of Ageing (ERIBA) with a tenure-track position. His work is supported by several agencies and companies. Dr. Demaria serves as Editor in Chief for npj Aging, and as reviewer for several journals and funding agencies. In 2018 he co-founded a start-up company, Cleara Biotech. Since 2022 he is the President of the International Cell Senescence Association (ICSA).

Dr. Satomi Miwa is a Lecturer in Translational Biology of Ageing at Newcastle University, who started off as a sport scientist and developed an interest in energy metabolism, mitochondria, and oxidative stress. Her research interests lie in the areas of mitochondrial function in ageing and diseases, and she works on both mechanistic investigation and translational studies.

Dr. Miwa has a diverse range of expertise in the field of ageing biology, and her contributions to the understanding of mitochondrial function in ageing and diseases, and critical evaluation of methodologies, have made significant impacts on the scientific community.

She demonstrated that mitochondrial complex I assembly status can predict lifespan, and discovered a non-canonical function of mTERT protein in improving mitochondrial function under dietary restriction, especially in the brain. She has also made the original discovery that post-mitotic neurons develop senescent phenotype and has shown the effects of dietary restriction in reducing senescent cells in multiple tissues, which were linked with improved tissue conditions.

For methodology, she has made an important improvement in Amplex Red based hydrogen peroxide detection by discovering a previously unknown cause of 'background' signal in certain cell types and rectifying it.

Her current research projects hold great promise for the development of novel senescent cell targeted therapies that involve manipulation of mitochondrial function against ageing and pathologies.

Folkert Kuipers PhD (1957) is Professor of Pediatrics and Scientific Director of the European Research Institute for the Biology of Ageing (ERIBA)/head of the Department of the Biology of Ageing at the University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG) since 2022. He studied biology/biochemistry at the University of Groningen (UoG) and received his PhD degree in Medical Sciences at UoG in 1987. After a research fellowship from the Royal Netherlands Academy for Arts and Sciences (5y) and an Established Investigatorship from the Netherlands Heart Foundation (5y), he was appointed as Professor of Pediatrics in 2000 and was Head of the Laboratory of Pediatrics at UMCG from 2000-2008 and 2016-2022. His research program deals with molecular (dys) regulation of cholesterol, bile acid and lipid metabolism and transport in liver and intestine in inherited and age-related metabolic diseases, including roles of the gut microbiome. He is (co-)author of >350 peer-reviewed publications and has supervised >40 PhD theses. From 2008-2016 he served as Dean of the Faculty of Medical Sciences/UMCG and was involved in initiation and implementation of the Healthy Ageing program at UMCG, with population cohort Lifelines and ERIBA as scientific flagship projects. He holds the Noaber Foundation Healthy Life named professorship. Currently, he serves in the Scientific Advisory Board of the Netherlands Heart Foundation and is member of the External Advisory Boards of the Robert and Arlene Kogod Center for Aging Research, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, USA and the Multidisciplinary Institute for Ageing (MIA), University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal.

Zachary Gerhart-Hines is an Associate Professor at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research at the University of Copenhagen (UCPH). His lab interrogates how peripheral and central mechanisms control systemic energy balance and how these networks break down during the development of obesity and type 2 diabetes. He further seeks to leverage these discoveries to generate novel pharmacotherapies for the treatment of cardiometabolic diseases. To this end, he is a co-founder of Embark Biotech ApS, a UCPH spinout.

Volkan Sayin completed his PhD studies at University of Gothenburg, Sweden where he described a controversial tumor promoting role for dietary and supplementary antioxidants named the “dark side of Anitoxidants”. Next, he went for postdoctoral studies in the PapaG lab at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York, US, where he studied the role of the endogenous oxidative stress response pathway and its implications for cancer metabolism, resulting in multiple Phase I/II precision medicine trials on patients with Keap1/Nrf2 mutant lung adenocarcinomas.

In 2019, Volkan established his translational lung oncology group at the Sahlgrenska Center for Cancer Research at the Institute of Clinical Sciences at Uni. of Gothenburg, Sweden, focusing on cancer metabolism, redox biology,and aging. He was recently promoted to Associate Professor for his efforts building a patient-derived precision medicine platform bridging surgery, oncology, pathology with preclinical molecular medicine.

Dr. Chini is a native from Brazil and has been at the Mayo Clinic for 30 years. Dr. Chini is a physician scientist. Dr. Chini received his MD, PhD from UFRJ in Brazil, and his anesthesiology residency was completed at the Mayo Clinic. Dr. Chini's research focus is in the fields of metabolism, nutrition, obesity, pharmacology, cancer and aging, and kidney disease. In particular, Dr. Chini is interested in nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD) metabolism and functions. He and his colleagues are exploring the nonoxidative and oxidative roles of NAD (as a signaling molecule and energy coin in cells). Dr. Chini's laboratory has done seminal work on NAD catabolism, including the description of the main enzyme responsible for the degradation of this molecule in mammalian tissues. This enzyme in named CD38 and is responsible for age-related NAD decline. Dr. Chini received several awards during his career.

Simon Bekker-Jensen has a PhD in Cancer Biology from the Technical University of Denmark and the Danish Cancer Research Centre. Prior to establishing his independent group within cellular stress signaling in 2016, he has 10 years of experience in research within the DNA damage response. Amongst others, he holds a Consolidator Grant from The European Research Council and is an EMBO Young Investigator.

Tinna Stevnsner has a PhD in Molecular Biology. In 2020 she became a professor in molecular biology of aging at Aarhus University, Denmark. Her research aims to obtain new insight into the complex relation between genomic instability, DNA repair mechanisms and the aging process in various tissues of mammals. Within the most recent years she has dedicated much of her research to studies of the regulation of DNA repair processes in the brain. Within this context she has been studying how for example neurotrophic factors and modification of DNA repair proteins may influence DNA repair capacity and how DNA repair efficiency seem to correlate with cognitive capacity at very old age.

Ellen Nollen is a professor of Molecular Biology of Aging at the European Research institute for the Biology of Ageing (ERIBA) of the University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG). Her research focuses on cellular and organismal mechanisms of protection against protein damage in aging and age-related diseases.

Liesbeth Veenhoff is an associate professor at the European Research Institute for the Biology of Ageing. She received her PhD degree (cum laude) at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands in 2001. As a HFSP-fellow she worked with Prof. Michael Rout at the Rockefeller University in New York. She returned back to the Netherlands, and supported by prestigious Veni (2004), Vidi (2008) and Vici (2020) grants, she established the main research directions in her laboratory.

The team aims to understand the role of the nuclear pore complex (NPC) in ageing and age-related diseases. NPCs are the sole gateways to the interior of the nucleus and their function is essential to all eukaryotic life. The NPC's function is intimately connected to the primary hallmarks of ageing of protein homeostasis and genome stability, and several processes underlying these hallmarks are orchestrated at NPCs. As aging progresses, the NPC's performance becomes compromised, motivating our objective to elucidate the mechanisms responsible for maintaining NPC quality control. Our ageing studies are motivated from the viewpoint that studying “biology in time” is an unbiased way to reveal fundamental knowledge; knowledge that is needed to combat age-related diseases.

Educated as an MD and trained as a specialist in Rheumatology. Currently Professor of Sports Medicine at Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, University of Copenhagen, Denmark and Head and Consultant at Institute of Sports Medicine, Dept of Orthopedic Surgery, Copenhagen University Hospital - Bispebjerg. The main focus research area is the understanding of physiology and pathophysiology in tendon and skeletal muscle use and overuse in relation to advancing age. Board of Center for Healthy Aging, Univesity of Copenhagen.

Nathan LeBrasseur, PT, PhD, is a Professor in the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation and has a joint appointment in the Department of Physiology and Biomedical Engineering at Mayo Clinic. Dr. LeBrasseur is the Director of the Robert and Arlene Kogod Center on Aging, the Co-Director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research, and Scientific Director of the Office of Translation to Practice at Mayo Clinic. He is the current chair of the NIH Cellular Mechanisms in Aging and Development Study Section. Dr. LeBrasseur's research team conducts translational “bench-to-bedside” research on strategies to improve physical function, metabolism, and resilience in the face of aging and disease. His latest work has centered on cellular senescence, a fundamental mechanism of aging, and interventions to counter this process to extend healthspan. Dr. LeBrasseur has received the Glenn Award for Research in Biological Mechanisms of Aging, the Nathan W. Shock Award Lecture from the National Institute on Aging, and the Vincent Cristofalo Rising Star Award in Aging Research from the American Federation for Aging Research. He is a Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America.

Steen Larsen achieved his Doctoral degree in 2014 from the University of Copenhagen focusing on mitochondrial physiology in human skeletal muscle. He is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Health & Medical Sciences at the University of Copenhagen, besides from that he is also a visiting Professor at the Medical University of Bialystok in Poland. He has published around 100 papers in reputed journals. His research focus is on mitochondrial function in health and disease, with an interest on how physical activity and diet affects the mitochondria.

Steen Larsen achieved his Doctoral degree in 2014 from the University of Copenhagen focusing on mitochondrial physiology in human skeletal muscle. He is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Health & Medical Sciences at the University of Copenhagen, besides from that he is also a visiting Professor at the Medical University of Bialystok in Poland. He has published around 100 papers in reputed journals. His research focus is on mitochondrial function in health and disease, with an interest on how physical activity and diet affects the mitochondria.

Dr Voisin is an Assistant Professor working in the Barres group at the NNF Center for Basic Metabolic Research. She uses advanced statistical and bioinformatics methods to understand how the epigenome interacts with intrinsic (age, sex) and extrinsic (exercise, diet) factors to influence human health. During her PhD, she developed a unique bioinformatics pipeline to systematically annotate the epigenome and used data mining to integrate complex genetic and epigenetic data from multiple cohorts and multiple tissues of the human body (Voisin et al., Genome Med 2015). As a postdoc, she established an epigenetic clock for skeletal muscle with collaborator Steve Horvath (Voisin, et al. J Cachexia Sarcopenia Muscle 2020), available as an open-access Bioconductor R package (MEAT), to predict age using muscle DNA methylation profiles. Subsequently, she used data mining and her extensive network of collaborators to meta-analyse results from 12 cohorts and 1,000 human muscle samples (Voisin, et al. J Cachexia Sarcopenia Muscle 2021), which identified robust, age-related epigenetic changes in muscle. She has made these results available as an open-access, user-friendly webtool called MetaMeth. She subsequently demonstrated that exercise training is associated with rejuvenated epigenetic and transcriptomic patterns in human muscle (Voisin et al., Aging Cell 2023). Finally, she led a comprehensive review on how to quantify the ageing epigenome and showed her vision to advance the aging field (Seale, Horvath, Teschendorff, Eynon, Voisin, Nat Rev Genet 2022).

Dr. Jingyuan Fu is a professor of systems medicine in the University Medical Centre Groningen, the Netherlands, with a particular focus on integrative genomics and host-microbe interactions in complex diseases. She obtained a BSc in Biochemistry, a MSc in Biotechnology and Bioinformatics (cum laude), and a PhD in systems genetics (cum laude). Via this route she developed her research line on systems genetics in complex traits and became an expert in integrative genomics and systems biology. Her research aims to acquire a greater knowledge of how the human genome and the gut microbiome interact with each other and affect human health, in order to create better methods for disease prediction, prevention, and treatment. To accomplish this, her study combines with large-scale genetic and microbial association studies in big groups of individuals with functional studies using advanced bacterial culturing and organ-on-a-chip technologies. She holds ERC-CoG, NWO-VICI and several national consortia grants, and is recognized as an “Highly Cited Researcher” by Web of Science and a laureate of AMMODO Science Award in 2023.

Jonas Treebak is a physiologist studying molecular metabolism in humans and rodent models of metabolic disease. He obtained his PhD in skeletal muscle metabolism from University of Copenhagen, Denmark in 2009, and in 2011 he was appointed Group Leader at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research (CBMR), University of Copenhagen where he currently holds a position as Associate Professor. The research activities of his group are directed towards interrogating the signaling pathways controlling cellular and whole-body glucose and lipid homeostasis. To resolve physiological roles of genes, proteins, and pathways that regulate metabolism, transgenic animals with mutant and wild-type forms of candidate genes are applied. Over recent years, his focus has been on determining the importance of the NAD+ generating systems for the ability of cells to adapt to metabolic stress. In particular, the protein NAMPT has been investigated in skeletal muscle, liver, adipose tissue and the hypothalamus. His group is developing in vivo methodologies to assess the functional role of novel targets in metabolic diseases, and his is also coordinating the work in the Rodent Metabolic Phenotyping Platform at CBMR.

Dr. Joao Passos is a Professor at Mayo Clinic with nearly 20 years' experience in the field of biology of aging. He directs the Cell and Molecular Aging laboratory at Mayo Clinic and holds the positions of Associate Director of the Robert and Arlene Kogod Center on Aging and director of its Discovery Science Theme. Dr. Passos has led an independent research program focused on cellular senescence and mechanisms of aging since 2010, firstly at the Newcastle University Institute for Ageing in the UK and since 2018 at Mayo Clinic. His laboratory has been continuously funded by several UK, European and US funding bodies since its inception. He has published more than 100 papers about biology of aging.

Dr. Passos' laboratory has made several important contributions to the understanding of the mechanisms driving cellular senescence in aging and age-related disease, with a particular emphasis on telomeres and mitochondria. His investigations have provided critical insights into how chronic DNA damage signaling from irreparable telomeric damage triggers cellular senescence in response to stress. Furthermore, his laboratory has shown that mitochondria are key regulators of the proinflammatory phenotype characteristic of senescent cells.

Lino Silva Ferreira holds a Ph.D. in Biotechnology from the University of Coimbra (Portugal). He did postdoctoral work at INEB (Portugal) and MIT (USA) in the areas of stem cells and nanotechnologies. He established his research group in 2008 at the University of Coimbra. Since then is the director of the Advanced Therapies research group, CNC coordinator of the MIT-Portugal Program and the founder of the biotech companies Matera and Curemat. Since 2018, he is the associate editor of Biomaterials Science Journal (RSC) journal. In 2012, he was awarded with a prestigious European Research Council starting grant and in 2016 a prestigious ERA Chair position in the area of Ageing at the University of Coimbra. Since 2020, he is the coordinator of the Colab4Ageing, a collaborative laboratory that integrates companies, health and social providers, in the area of ageing. His group has interest in the development of ageing models and in the creation of new therapeutic approaches to fight ageing, in particular cardiovascular ageing.

Vadim Gladyshev is a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Director of the Center for Redox Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital, and faculty member of the Broad Institute. Dr. Gladyshev's lab focuses on studying aging, rejuvenation and lifespan control using a combination of experimental and computational approaches. He has published more than 400 articles. Dr. Gladyshev is the recipient of NIH Pioneer, Transformative and Eureka awards and is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, USA.