San Diego Nathan Shock Center

Vera Gorbunova, PhD
Doris Johns Cherry Professor of Biology and Medicine
Co-Director, Rochester Aging Research Center
University of Rochester

Vera Gorbunova is an endowed Professor of Biology at the University of Rochester and a co-director of the Rochester Aging Research Center. Her research is focused on understanding the mechanisms of longevity and genome stability and on the studies of exceptionally long-lived mammals. Gorbunova earned her BSc degrees at Saint Petersburg State University, Russia and her PhD at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. Gorbunova pioneered comparative biology approach to study aging and identified rules that control evolution of tumor suppressor mechanisms depending on the species lifespan and body mass. Gorbunova investigates the role of Sirtuin proteins in maintaining genome and epigenome stability. She also investigates the role of genomic instability and transposable elements in aging and disease. She demonstrated that LINE1 elements trigger innate immune response that drives age-related sterile inflammation. She has more than 100 publications including publications in high profile journals such as Nature, Science and Cell. Her work received awards of from the Ellison Medical Foundation, the Glenn Foundation, American Federation for Aging Research, and from the National Institutes of Health. Her work was awarded the Cozzarelli Prize from PNAS, prize for research on aging from ADPS/Alianz, France, Prince Hitachi Prize in Comparative Oncology, Japan, and Davey prize from Wilmot Cancer Center.

Nicola Neretti, PhD
Associate Professor of Molecular Biology, Cell Biology, and Biochemistry
Associate Director for the Center on the Biology of Aging
Brown University

Nicola Neretti serves as an Associate Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology, Cell Biology, and Biochemistry at Brown University. His research focuses on investigating genomic and epigenomic instability in the context of aging and cellular senescence. He contributed to the identification of transposable elements’ activation and extensive chromatin changes in senescent cells, as well as the characterization of a juxtacrine form of secondary senescence.

Presently, his research centers on the application of single-cell and spatial omics techniques to study senescent cells in aging tissues. Additionally, he is actively involved in developing innovative imaging and analysis techniques for exploring the three-dimensional organization of the genome within the nucleus.

Morgan Levine, PhD
Principal Investigator
Altos Labs

Morgan Levine is a Principal Investigator at the Altos Labs San Diego Institute of Science. Prior to joining Altos, she was a ladder rank professor at Yale University School of Medicine. Levine is considered a leader in the biology of aging, most recognized for developing methods for quantifying the system dysregulation that occurs over an organism’s lifetime. Her work relies on interdisciplinary approaches, integrating theories and techniques from computational and molecular biology to track trajectories aging cells and organisms take over time. Her vision is to develop multi-scale computational models that translate how cellular states lead to manifestations of health and disease at the tissue or organismal level. Levine has received numerous awards for her work, including the Vincent Cristofalo Rising Star Award in Aging Research in 2021 and the Nathan Shock New Investigator Award in 2020.

Peter H. Sudmant, PhD
Assistant Professor of Integrative Biology
UC Berkeley

The Sudmant Lab at UC Berkeley uses genomics, computational, statistical, and experimental methods to interrogate genetic and molecular phenotypic diversity at both the organismal and cellular level. We study the evolution, causes, and consequences of aging as well as the evolution of genome structure and cellular diversity.