2024 Grant Recipients

• Priya Balasubramanian, BVSc PhD*, Assistant Professor, University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center: Deconstructing adipocyte heterogeneity and its impact on calorie restriction mediated anti-aging benefits
• Lacy Barton, PhD, Assistant Professor, The University of Texas at San Antonio: Elucidating the impact of parental age on embryonic germline development
• Yang Lyu, PhD, Assistant Professor, Rutgers University: Motivation Reward and Longevity as Influenced by Serotonin Dopamine and Metabolism
• Jonathan Nelson, PhD**, Assistant Professor, Stony Brook University: Understanding how ribosomal DNA maintenance sustains cellular longevity
  
• Alison E. Ringel, PhD, Assistant Professor, Ragon Institute of Mass General MIT and Harvard: Targeting T Cell Dysfunction to Delay Tissue Aging
• Carlos Giovanni Silva-García, PhD, Assistant Professor, Brown University: Neuronal regulation of histone acetylation promotes longevity
• Daniel Tyrrell, PhD, Assistant Professor, University of Alabama at Birmingham: Understanding Gzmk+ CD8+ T Cell Development and Activity in Aging

*Underwritten fully by the WoodNext Foundation, a component fund administered by Greater Houston Community Foundation

**Underwritten fully by the Hearst Foundations

Other funders of the Grants for Junior Faculty include: AFAR Board of Directors, Anonymous, Diane Nixon, Diana Jacobs Kalman, Rose M. Badgeley Charitable Trust, The Irene Diamond Fund, The Lowell F. Johnson Foundation, The Irving S. Wright Endowment

• Aidan Gilchrist, PhD, Assistant Professor, University of California Davis: Microenvironmental regulation of metabolism in hematopoietic stem cell aging
• Longhua Guo, PhD, Assistant Professor, University of Michigan: Molecular and Cellular Mechanisms of extreme longevity and global tissue rejuvenation
• Changyang Linghu, PhD, Assistant Professor, University of Michigan: Spatiotemporally scalable recording of single-cell gene expression histories across aging brain
• Ayshwarya Subramanian, PhD, Assistant Professor, Cornell University: Macrophage niches in aging

• Jeffrey Friedman, MD, PhD, Professor, The Rockefeller University & Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute: Cellular and Molecular Basis for Hypothalamus Aging
• Myriam Heiman, PhD, Associate Professor of Neuroscience, Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Charting the Cellular Rejuvenation Landscape in Aging Neurons

• Amanat Ali, Pharm-D, PhD, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Albert Einstein College of Medicine: Identification and Characterization of Functional Coding Variants in human longevity pathways
• Lena Batoon, PhD, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Mayo Clinic: Role of bone marrow macrophage iron accumulation in inflammaging
• Walker Hoolehan, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow, Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation: Identifying single-molecule epigenetic modification patterns regulating age-associated neuroinflammatory gene expression programs
• Xiaolin ‘Lindsay’ Huang, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of California, Berkeley: The role of diminished dopamine levels on age-related sleep disturbances
  
• Ryan Marshall, PhD, Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of Wisconsin-Madison: Investigating Age- and Sex-Specific Proteostatic Responses in Skeletal Muscle to Isoleucine Restriction and Weight-Pulling Exercise
• Ethan A. Perets, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow, UT Southwestern Medical Center: Dissecting Innate Immunity at Organelle Contact Sites in Brain Aging
• Andrea Francesca M. Salvador, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow, Stanford University: Characteristics causes and consequences of interoceptive dysfunction in aging
• Omer Sharon, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of California, Berkeley: The role of sleep-dependent glymphatic brain clearance in human aging
• Lilian Silva, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow, Saint Louis University: New roles of nuclear STING in aging
• Hongyang Xu, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow, Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation: Role of iPLA2 on store operated Ca2+ entry (SOCE) and muscle force generation during aging
• Yanxin Xu, PhD, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Massachusetts General Hospital: How does metformin block chronic inflammation in senescence and aging
• Yifei Zhou, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School: A non-canonical role of nucleoporins in bridging energy sensing and aging

• Yeeun Bae, Virginia Tech: The role of K63 polyubiquitination in age-related memory decline
• Ruth Barros De Paula, Baylor College: Cross-species Analyses of the Sphingolipid Metabolism in Aging and Parkinson’s Disease
• Andreia Cadar, University of Connecticut Health Center: Impact of Senolytics on Vaccine Responses in Young and Aged Mice
• Alexander Lasher, University of Alabama at Birmingham: The physiological impact of α-cell growth hormone signaling in healthy aging
• Keionna Netwon, University of California Los Angeles: Defining the spatial landscape of microglia-dopamine neuron interactions during aging
• Wynnie Nguyen, University of Southern California: Investigating age-related neural stem cell dysfunction and rejuvenation in neurodegenerative disease
• Cynthia Siebrand, Buck Institute/University of Southern California: Modulation of neuroinflammation and protein aggregate removal in Alzheimer’s disease using tau-targeting CAR-Treg cells
• Yifei Wang, University of California Berkeley: Investigate the interplay between with Aging and Clonal Hematopoiesis
• Sabrina Zequeira, University of Florida: Mechanisms and therapeutic potential of cannabinoids for age-associated cognitive decline
  
• Zehao Zhang, The Rockefeller University: Cellular and molecular portraits of sex differences in mammalian aging across organs
  

• Janine Kwapis, PhD, Assistant Professor, Pennsylvania State University: Improving cognitive flexibility in old age by fixing the transcriptome within memory cells
• Sanaz Sedaghat, PhD, Assistant Professor, University of Minnesota: Biological Aging Clock: A Tool to Differentiate Cognitive Aging Trajectories

• Amy Vandiver, MD, PhD, Clinical Instructor Clinician-Investigator Track, University of California Los Angeles: Mitochondrial transcripts: a novel metric of aging in RNA-sequencing data

The 2024 Beeson Scholars are fully funded through the National Institute on Aging (NIA) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)

• Christy Cauley, MD, MPH, Assistant Professor: Harvard Medical School/Mass General Hospital: Improving Biopsychosocial Outcomes of Older Adults Facing Fecal Ostomy Surgery
• Erin DeMartino, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine, Mayo Clinic Rochester: Assessing Needs and Advancing Dignity-Conserving Care for Hospitalized, Incarcerated Older Adults: Clinical Data, Patient Experience, and Policy Evaluation
• Adam Faye, MD, Assistant Professor, New York University School of Medicine: Optimal Preoperative Care for Older Adults with Inflammatory Bowel Disease
  
• Michelle Fullard, MD, Assistant Professor of Surgery, University of Colorado Denver: Improving Shared Decision-Making for Older Adults with Cognitive Impairment: Parkinson’s Disease as a Model
• Matthew Growdon, MD, MPH, Assistant Professor of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco: Optimizing medication use and support among people with dementia who live alone
• Mary Ellen Koran, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor of Radiology and Radiological Sciences, Vanderbilt University Medical Center: Genetic architecture of age of onset of amyloid positivity: Integrating imaging and genetic tools to identify novel driver of diseased
  
• Sara LaHue, MD, Assistant Professor of Neurology, University of California, San Francisco: Characterizing the Relationship Between Delirium and Biological Age in Traumatic Brain Injury: Implications for Cognitive Decline in Older Adults
• Matthew Miller, PT, DPT, PhD, Assistant Professor of Physical Therapy, University of California, San Francisco: Tailoring Rehabilitation to the needs of Older Adults with Cognitive Impairment and Dementia
• Michael Nanna, MD, MHS, FSCAI, FACC, Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine, Yale University School of Medicine: Estimating the treatment effect of cardiovascular medications to modify the risk for future cognitive decline in older adults
• Sarah Nouri, MD, MPH, Assistant Professor of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco: CARES: A Caregiver-Facing Digital Symptom Assessment Tool for Marginalized Older Adults with Serious Illness
• Anna Parks, MD, Assistant Professor, University of Utah: Advancing patient-centered decision making in older adults with venous thrombeombolism
• Daniel Shalev, MD, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Weill Cornell Medicine: CoCM-PAL: Adapting Collaborative Care of Older Adults with Serious Illness and Comorbid Depression or Anxiety
• Jinjiao Wang, PhD, RN, Associate Professor, University of Rochester School of Nursing: Deprescribing for Post-Acute Care Older Patients with Dementia in Home Health Care