Announcing 2025 Glenn Foundation for Medical Research Postdoctoral Fellowships in Aging Research and the Postdoctoral Fellowship Continuation Awards Recipients

AFAR and the Glenn Foundation for Medical Research are pleased to announce the recipients of the 2025 Glenn Foundation for Medical Research Postdoctoral Fellowships in Aging Research and the Postdoctoral Fellowship Continuation Awards.

The Glenn Foundation for Medical Research Postdoctoral Fellowships in Aging Research support postdoctoral fellows who direct their research towards basic research mechanisms of aging and/or translational findings that have the potential to directly benefit human health. Twelve, one-year fellowships of $75,000 have been awarded this year:

• Richard Giadone, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard University: Pharmacologic Recapitulation of Parabiosis to Improve the Aging Central Nervous System
• Paula Godoy, PhD, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of California, San Diego: Rejuvenating Aged Hematopoietic Stem Cells Through Multimodal Single-Cell Approaches
• Nils Grotehans, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School: A Novel Strategy to Restore Mitochondrial Function in Aging
• Airat Ibragimov, PhD, Postdoctoral Associate, University of Rochester: Putting aging on pause: targeting SIRT6 and CDK9 to ameliorate age-related transcriptional dysregulation
• Jingyun Luan, PhD, Postdoctoral Scholar, University of Chicago: Decoding epigenetic regulation to rejuvenate aging-induced stem cell exhaustion
• Tianji Ma, PhD, Postdoctoral Scholar, University of California, San Francisco: Homeostatic regulation of protein-specific appetite in aging
• Nalini Rao, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow, Gladstone Institutes: Elucidating how aging impairs brain proteostasis and protein clearance.
• Vinaya Sahasrabuddhe, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai: Investigating the Plasticity and Role of Microglia in Brain Aging
• Jorge Sanz Ros, MD, PhD, Postdoctoral Scholar, Stanford University: Investigating the Role of Aging and Senescence in Astrocyte-Mediated Synapse Phagocytosis
• Xifan Wang, PhD, Postdoctoral Research Scientist, Columbia University Medical Center: Role of gut microbiota in mediating the beneficial effects of rapamycin in delaying female reproductive aging
• Honggui Wu, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellowship, McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT: Development of High-Throughput Single-Cell DNA Methylation Clock Profiling
• Qiang Xiao, PhD, Postdoctoral Associate, The Scripps Research Institute: Reversing neuronal aging by activating declined autophagy in aged neurons

The Glenn Foundation for Medical Research Postdoctoral Fellowship Continuation Awards is a new award mechanism in 2025, for previous or current GFMR fellows whose research is deemed highly promising and would benefit from an additional year of funding, provided they are still a postdoctoral fellow at the start date of the award. Ten Glenn Foundation for Medical Research Postdoctoral Fellowship Continuation Awards have been granted this year:

• Amanat Ali, Pharm-D, PhD, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Albert Einstein College of Medicine: Identification and Characterization of Functional Coding Variants in Human Longevity Pathways
• Walker Hoolehan, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow, Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation: Identifying single-molecule epigenetic modification patterns regulating age-associated neuroinflammatory gene expression programs
• Sooyeon Lee, PhD, Instructor, Stanford University: The pathophysiological role of Succinate Dehydrogenase deficiency in β-cell aging and diabetes
• Ryan Marshall, PhD, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Wisconsin-Madison: Exploring mTORC1-dependent mechanisms of lipidome remodeling in aging skeletal muscle through resistance training and isoleucine restriction
• 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: Non-canonical roles of cGAS-STING in aging
• Gunjan Singh, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow, Brown University: Determining the role of Dosage Compensation Complex in regulation of sex-specific aging of brain
• Yuting Tan, MD, PhD, Instructor, Stanford University: Targeting glycosylation defects to restore efferocytosis and reverse 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
• Jiping Yang, PhD, Associate Research Scientist, Columbia University Medical Center: Centenarian regulatory variants-guided discovery of therapeutic targets for healthy aging

AFAR is grateful to the Glenn Foundation for Medical Research for its support of these programs.