Steven N. Austad, PhD, is the Protective Life Endowed Chair in Healthy Aging Research and a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). He is also founding director of UAB’s Nathan Shock Center of Excellence in the Basic Biology of Aging and co-director of the UAB Integrative Center for Aging Research. He also serves as co-principal investigator of the National Institute on Aging’s Nathan Shock Centers Coordinating Center. Dr. Austad’s multiple-award-winning research uses a variety of traditional and nontraditional animal species, employing both laboratory and field studies, to seek to discover underlying causes of aging with a long-term goal of developing interventions that slow the age-related decay in human health. He is the author or editor of five books and more than 200 scientific papers and book chapters covering nearly every aspect of the biological aging process from the level of cells to the level of populations. He also serves as well on the External Advisory Committee of the Mayo Clinic’s Kogod Center on Aging and the Observational Study Monitoring Board of the multi-institutional NIH-supported Longevity Consortium.
Dr. Austad maintains a keen interest in communicating science to the general public. In that capacity, he has written more than 150 essays and op-eds for print and electronic media has previously served on the Science Advisory Board of National Public Radio and has been a consultant for exhibitions on aging to the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (Portland, Oregon), the Perot Museum of Nature and Science (Dallas, Texas), and the American Museum of Natural History (New York City). He has written popular science articles for numerous publications including Natural History magazine, Scientific American, National Wildlife, and International Wildlife. His trade book, Why We Age (1997, 1999), has been translated into eight languages. His latest book, Methuselah’s Zoo: what nature can teach us about living longer, healthier lives (MIT Press), is out now.
Learn more at www.stevenaustad.com.
Follow him on Twitter @StevenAustad.
