The American Federation for Aging Research (AFAR) is pleased to announce the recipient of the 2024 Sagol Network GerOmic Award for Junior Faculty: Amy Vandiver, MD, PhD, Clinical Instructor Clinician-Investigator Track, University of California Los Angeles. Established in 2020, the Sagol Network GerOmic Award for Junior Faculty is a one- to two-year award given to junior faculty (MDs and PhDs) to conduct aging-related Omics (GerOmics) research.
Omics is a rapidly evolving, multi-disciplinary, and emerging field that encompasses genomics, epigenomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics. Each of these fields offers the possibility to understand and view biology from a global perspective in a way that was previously unthinkable. Given the biological complexity and heterogeneity of the aging process, omics research can play an important role in providing important insights into the aging process and many age-related diseases.
Dr. Vandiver’s funded project is titled “Mitochondrial transcripts: a novel metric of aging in RNA-sequencing data.” Dr. Vandiver will evaluate a potential broadly applicable aging metric and will directly test the transcriptomic consequences of elevated mitochondrial deletion mutations. Insight into both questions has the potential to advance our understanding of the role of these changes in the biology of aging and move towards targeted interventions.
“GerOmics research is essential to help unfold the complexity of biology of aging,” says Stephanie Lederman, EdM, Executive Director, AFAR. “AFAR is pleased to continue our collaboration with the Sagol Network to encourage early career investigators to focus their research on this vital emerging field.”
Source – Eurekalert