Anthony is a second-year PhD student in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (BICB). He joined the Dong Lab in 2022 and later completed his B.S. in Biology at the University of Minnesota in 2024, continuing in the lab as he transitioned into his graduate research. His work focuses on how somatic mutations accumulate in normal, aging tissues and what shapes where they arise across the genome.

I am a 3rd-year student in the Microbiology, Immunology, and Cancer Biology (MICaB) graduate program. I work in Dr. Christina Camell's lab, where I study how CD8+ T cells, which are important infection mediators, become dysfunctional during aging. In particular, I will study how this dysfunction is driven by epigenetic reprogramming. The visceral adipose tissue (VAT) becomes increasingly inflamed and infiltrated by immune cells during aging. This tissue is thought to be one of the first sites of immune aging, and is abundant in growth differentiation factor 3 (GDF3) transcripts.

My name is Audrey Daugherty, and I received my Bachelor’s in Microbiology and Cell Science with minors in Health Disparities and Spanish from the University of Florida. I grew up in south Florida on an agricultural tree farm and moved to Minnesota after my undergraduate studies for research. In my post-baccalaureate years, I pursued research at the University of Minnesota in gene therapies for rare neurodegenerative disease and mechanisms of progeroid syndromes.

Carolina earned her bachelor’s degree in Biological and Pharmaceutical Chemistry from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). Afterwards, she completed an MRes in Biosciences at the Institute of Healthy Ageing at University College London (UCL), where she had the opportunity to conduct her research on long-lived worms. Next, she carried out her doctoral studies within the UCL Cancer Institute. As part of her PhD thesis, she explored the relationship between histone lysine methyltransferases/demethylases and aging in flies.

I'm a PhD candidate with the MCDBG program and master's candidate with BICB, advised by Dr. Matthew Gill and co-advised by Dr. Chad Myers. Because aging and life extension are such complicated processes, and honing in on a single target is so challenging, I am taking a phenotype-centric approach to drug discovery for aging with C. elegans for my thesis project. On one front, I have developed a scalable, deep-learning based imaging assay to screen for drugs that increase heat stress resistance (a predictor of longevity) in worms.

I am a postdoctoral fellow working in the lab of Dr. Douglas Mashek in the Department of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, and Biophysics. The goal of my research is to determine how we can harness fasting-activated pathways, including lipolysis, to mitigate DNA damage and cellular senescence to ultimately prevent and/or treat age-related diseases. I am looking specifically at the effect of activation or overexpression of adipose triglyceride lipase, the rate-limiting enzyme in lipolysis, on DNA damage and senescence in several cell types.

Jacob is a 3rd year PhD candidate in the Molecular, Cellular, Developmental Biology, and Genetics program, as well as a Bioinformatics and Computational Biology MS student.  Jacob performs his thesis research in Dr. Xiao Dong's lab, where he studies the role of somatic mutations in human aging.  Jacob is particularly interested in linking conserved patterns of somatic mutation accumulation to discrete health outcomes, with the goal of eventually developing drugs targeting fundamental drivers of genome instability.

Rahagir is a PhD candidate in the Biochemistry, Molecular Biology & Biophysics graduate program and working as a research assistant in the Niedernhofer lab. His research focuses on how DNA damage and cellular senescence impair the body’s capacity for repair and regeneration, leading to age-associated development of chronic diseases. 

William Hofstadter is a postdoc in the Department of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, and Biophysics and mentored by Dr. Doug Mashek. Will studies how subcellular organelle dynamics become dysfunctional with age and liver disease. In particular, he is interested in how the core metabolic organelles (lipid droplets, mitochondria, and peroxisomes) change their composition, shape, and function in diseased states.