Congratulations to Assistant Professor Jeffrey Miller who was recently chosen by The McLennan Dean’s Challenge Grant Program selection committee to receive funding in the amount of $50,000 to support research on “Studying mechanisms of aging via closed-loop analysis and experimentation.” Dr. William Mair, Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular Metabolism, is the Co-PI.
Each year the dean’s challenge grant program supports strategic investments that foster rapid innovation and advance the shared vision for a stronger, more dynamic, and more globally-engaged school. The two key priority topics for applications this year were (1) Aging and Longevity, and (2) Mental Health & Well-being.
A brief description of their proposal is below:
A key barrier limiting our ability to translate existing dietary, environmental, genetic, and pharmacological anti-aging interventions into effective human therapeutics is the fact that inter-individual responses are highly heterogeneous; some individuals show large healthspan gains for a given intervention, while others do not respond at all or live shorter. Thus, it is important to be able to accurately predict a given individual’s response to a given treatment, to maximize the health benefit. Focusing on C. elegans as a model organism for proof of concept, in this project we will (i) develop a predictive model of longevity based on functional mechanisms, and (ii) define biomarkers of physiological age and predictors of life expectancy.
