What inspired you to pursue aging research?
Age is the top risk factor for myriad diseases and mortality, but research into aging mechanisms and interventions has consistently received less interest and funding than research on diseases. Identifying the underlying mechanisms of aging and developing therapeutic aging interventions could be one of the most impactful biomedical discoveries of all time by targeting the upstream cause of most health disorders, including age-associated dementias.
In your view, what does AFAR mean to the field, and what does it mean, for you, to receive an AFAR grant now?
AFAR pushes aging research forward at every level. By receiving this postdoctoral fellowship, I have financial support to pursue research and postdoctoral training that will help me become a well-rounded investigator in the field of aging biology.
What is exciting about your research’s potential impact?
My research has the potential to identify new relationships between DNA modifications and the regulation of cell-type specific gene expression in the brain. We are taking a novel approach to studying long-range DNA modification patterns that could reap new insight into the relationship between age-associated epigenetic changes and neuroinflammatory gene expression programs that cause cognitive dysfunction.
How would you describe your research to a non-scientist?
Every cell in an individual shares the same genetic code. Epigenetic modifications mark the invariant genetic code with plastic information that defines cell identity. Changes to epigenetic modifications correlate with aging. Current methods focus on averaged epigenetic modification levels at specific sites or regions of the genome across populations of cells, so investigators have not found long-range epigenetic modification patterns that determine cell identity. We are working to identify epigenetic modification patterns regulating nervous system cell-type specific genes, how these epigenetic programs change during aging, and to determine if cell-type specific changes to epigenetic modification patterns correlate with cognitive dysfunction and age-associated inflammation in the brain. These studies will guide future development of epigenomic intervention strategies by determining whether harmful, age-associated epigenetic changes are primarily adaptive programs within specific cell types, or random changes accumulated during aging.
