Upcoming Seminars: Areas for Progress

We support promising approaches for solving key health extension areas via financial support, mentorship, and connection to relevant researchers, founders, and funders. Find a few of our mentors below.

Sonia Arrison

Sonia Arrison is a best-selling author, analyst, entrepreneur, and investor. She is founder of 100 Plus Capital, co-founder of Unsugarcoat Media (acquired by Medium), and associate founder and advisor to Singularity University in Mountain View, California. Her research focuses on exponentially growing technologies and their impact on society. Her most recent book, 100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family and Faith, addresses the social, economic, and cultural impacts of radical human longevity. It gained national best-seller status and keeps Sonia busy speaking all over the world. Sonia is a Board Member at the Thiel Foundation, Foresight Institute, and Woodland School. She is also a Senior Fellow at the Fraser Institute in Vancouver, British Columbia, and author of two previous books (Western Visions and Digital Dialog). She was previously a Director and Senior Fellow in Tech Studies at the Pacific Research Institute and a columnist at TechNewsWorld.

Steve Horvath, UCLA

Dr. Horvath is an aging researcher and bioinformatician whose research ranges from epidemiology, chronic diseases, epigenetics, to systems biology. He developed systemic biologic approaches such as weighted gene co-expression network analysis. He works on all aspects of biomarker development with a particular focus on genomic biomarkers of aging. He developed a highly accurate multi-tissue biomarker of aging known as the epigenetic clock. Salient features of the epigenetic clock include its high accuracy and its applicability to a broad spectrum of tissues and cell types. He develops and applies methods for analyzing and integrating gene expression-, DNA methylation-, microRNA, genetic marker-, and complex phenotype data. His lab members apply and develop data mining methods to study a broad spectrum of diseases, e.g. aging research, cancer, cardiovascular disease, HIV, Huntington’s disease, neurodegenerative diseases.

Nils Regge, Apollo VC

Nils is a serial entrepreneur and company builder with a long-standing passion for health and biomedicine. At Apollo, Nils brings deal making skills, his impeccable business sense, and his expertise in growing early stage startups.

Nils founded company builder and investor TruVenturo in 2010, and he has taken part in over 30 financing rounds as an investor or co-founder among the companies he has cofounded. Of these, three have attained valuations over $100M, having attracted capital from top venture capital companies such as Insight Venture Partners, Highland Capital, and Harbourvest. Nils sits on the boards of multiple companies in his portfolio, helping to push them rapidly towards inflection points by focusing his teams towards only those activities that generate shareholder value. Nils has studied business in Hamburg and at UC Santa Barbara (UCSB) in California. He also completed the EO Entrepreneurial Master’s Program at MIT.

Aubrey De Grey, SENS Research Foundation

Dr. de Grey is the biomedical gerontologist who devised the SENS platform, and established SENS Research Foundation to implement it. He received his BA in Computer Science and Ph.D. in Biology from the University of Cambridge in 1985 and 2000, respectively. Dr. de Grey is Editor-in-Chief of Rejuvenation Research, is a Fellow of both the Gerontological Society of America and the American Aging Association, and sits on the editorial and scientific advisory boards of numerous journals and organizations.

Andrew Scott, London Business School

Andrew J. Scott is Professor of Economics at London Business School having previously held positions at Oxford University, London School of Economics and Harvard University. His work focuses on the economics of longevity and he is the co-author of “The 100 Year Life” and “The New Long Life”. He was Managing Editor for the Royal Economic Society’s Economic Journal and Non-Executive Director for the UK’s Financial Services Authority 2009-2013. He is currently on the advisory board of the UK’s Office for Budget Responsibility, the Cabinet Office Honours Committee (Science and Technology), co-founder of The Longevity Forum, a member of the WEF council on Healthy Ageing and Longevity and a consulting scholar at Stanford University’s Center on Longevity. Andrew is also the recipient of an ESRC grant for researching the economic longevity dividend.

Jim O'Neill, SENS Research Foundation

Jim has advised, invested in, and nurtured more than seventy science and technology companies. While running the Thiel Foundation, he co-founded the Thiel Fellowship and helped create deep science fund Breakout Labs. Thiel Fellows have created more than $90 billion in equity value by founding companies including Freenome, Luminar, Figma, Upstart, OYO, Ethereum, Workflow, Fossa, and the Longevity Fund. Before moving to California, Jim helped lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as the principal associate deputy secretary. His responsibilities included overseeing policy and regulations at NIH, FDA, and CDC and he led two major reforms of FDA. He also supported the creation of the Armed Forces Institute for Regenerative Medicine, served on the steering committee of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, and represented the United States on the U.S. delegation to the World Health Assembly.

Reason, Repair Biotechnologies

Reason is co-founder and CEO of Repair Biotechnologies. He is the founder and writer of Fight Aging!, a leading news website in the biotech community. Reason is also an active angel investor in the space. Previously, Reason was principal software engineer at technology startups. Reason has Masters degrees in Space Physics and Astrophysics.

Joe Betts-LaCroix, CEO, Retro Biosciences

Following an academic background at Harvard, MIT, and Caltech, being an inventor on over 100 patents and applications, founding two prior companies with a combined 185 employees, spending 2 years as a part-time partner at Y Combinator, investing in and advising numerous biotechs, and publishing a Science paper in biophysics, Joe is now the CEO of Retro Biosciences, which uses high-throughput, high-dimensional approaches to develop therapies for diseases driven by the biology of aging.

Tina Wood, Collider Health

Tina is an ecosystem architect and works with organisations in both private and public sectors to accelerate innovation and transform health with sustainable impact at scale.

Morgan Levine, Yale University

Morgan Levine is a ladder-rank Assistant Professor in the Department of Pathology at the Yale School of Medicine and a member of both the Yale Combined Program in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, and the Yale Center for Research on Aging. Her work relies on an interdisciplinary approach, integrating theories and methods from statistical genetics, computational biology, and mathematical demography to develop biomarkers of aging for humans and animal models using high-dimensional omics data. As PI or co-Investigator on multiple NIH-, Foundation-, and University-funded projects, she has extensive experience using systems-level and machine learning approaches to track epigenetic, transcriptomic, and proteomic changes with aging and incorporate this information to develop measures of risk stratification for major chronic diseases, such as cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. Her work also involves development of systems-level outcome measures of aging, aimed at facilitating evaluation for geroprotective interventions. A number of the existing biological aging measures she has developed are being applied in both basic and observational research.

Gordan Lauc, University of Zagreb

Dr. Gordan Lauc is Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Zagreb Faculty of Pharmacy and Biochemistry. His laboratory performed the first large scale studies of the human plasma glycome (in 2009) and human IgG glycome (in 2011), which were the basis for the subsequent first GWAS of the human plasma and IgG glycomes. He was invited to lecture at numerous international conferences (including FEBS, EMBO, ASBMB, Glyco, etc), elected for visiting professor at the Johns Hopkins University, University of Edinburgh and Edith Cowan University in Perth. In 2011 he was inducted in the prestigious Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars. In 2007 Prof Lauc established Genos Ltd, a private research organisation accredited by the Croatian Ministry of Science, Education and Sport that currently has 28 employees, including 17 researchers. Genos was ranked as #1 in the 2013 survey of The Scientist magazine for “The best place to work for researches” in the category “Industry” and received a Charter of the Republic of Croatia (awarded by the President of Croatia) for an outstanding economic contribution to development of Croatia by commercialization of research results in 2014.

Daniel Bojar, 2020 Foresight Fellow, Harvard Wyss Institute

Daniel is the 2020 Foresight Fellow in Health & Longevity. His background is in structural biology, strengthened by a B.Sc. in biochemistry (University of Tuebingen, Germany, 2014) and a M.Sc. in biophysics (ETH Zurich, Switzerland, 2016) with distinction, enabled him to understand biological processes down to the atomic level. During his doctoral work with Dr. Martin Fussenegger at ETH Zurich, Daniel employed these fundamental insights to genetically re-engineer human cells for therapeutic purposes. Creatively using the principles of synthetic biology, he designed new proteins with a dedicated function – such as a novel caffeine receptor – and used these intricate tools to develop potent new cell-based therapies for diabetes mellitus and Parkinson’s disease. Further, Daniel was distinguished by several prestigious fellowships, such as the Excellence Scholarship and Opportunity Program of ETH Zurich and by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation, as well as in the form of a Selected Young Scientist at the 68th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, an honor extended to the 600 most promising biomedical scientists worldwide. As a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. James J. Collins at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, Daniel harnesses the potency of cutting edge machine learning techniques to elucidate the biological functions of glycans since September 2019. Daniel was the first researcher to devise, develop, and apply methods derived from artificial intelligence to glycans and begin to tame their astounding complexity. In 2020, Daniel, was selected to be part of the prestigious Branco Weiss Fellowship – Society in Science 2020 Fellows, and as such was awarded $106,000 annually for five years to work on connecting machine learning and glycobiology, towards unveiling the inner workings of biology and facilitating biomedical therapies of tomorrow.

Joris Deelen, Max Planck Institute for Ageing

Joris Deelen is leading the research group on Genetics and Biomarkers of Human Ageing at the Max Planck Institute for Ageing Research. The group studies the genetic mechanisms underlying healthy ageing in humans by investigating the effect of genetic variants that are unique to long-lived families on the functioning of pathways implicated in ageing and/or age-related diseases. Moreover, they try to identify and validate biomarkers of healthy ageing using data from large-scale international collaborations of human studies.

Kristen Fortney, BioAge

Kristen leads BIOAGE in its mission to develop a broad pipeline of therapies that target aging in order to increase healthspan and address chronic diseases. Kristen draws from a deep background in aging research and systems biology to develop BIOAGE’s data-driven approach to identify and target the molecular pathways that drive aging. Kristen received her PhD in Medical Biophysics from the University of Toronto, followed by postdoctoral training at Stanford University where she was a fellow of the Ellison Medical Foundation / American Federation for Aging Research. She has over 10 years of experience developing novel bioinformatics approaches for data-driven investigation into the mechanisms of aging and age-related disease, with 18 published papers spanning computational drug discovery, biomarkers of aging, and the genetics of exceptional human longevity.

Felix Faber, Cambridge University

Felix received a B.Sc. and a M.Sc. in physics at Linköping University in Sweden, followed by a Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of Basel. His master’s thesis, which was later published in the International Journal of Quantum Chemistry, was one of the first works that demonstrated successful learning of crystal formation energies. Felix developed machine learning techniques for modeling fundamental quantum mechanical properties. Such properties include energies, forces, and dipole moments of crystals and molecules. In one of his first Ph.D. projects, which was published in Physical Review Letters, Felix used a machine learning model to predict formation energies of almost 2 million Elpasolite crystal structures. This model was also used to identify around 90 potentially thermodynamically stable structures. He was also among those who pioneered the use of quantum mechanical operators directly on machine learning models, which results in improved performance and is a stepping stone towards universal machine learning modeling of quantum mechanical properties. Additionally, Felix dedicated parts of his Ph.D. to benchmarking and comparing the performance of different machine learning models. In one such example Felix and his team, in collaboration with scientists from google, performed one of the most comprehensive comparisons of different machine learning models to date. Felix envisions a research framework where these techniques could be harnessed to understand and model biological and materials systems of varying complexity. Such fundamental models could be used to develop therapeutics, as well as new materials tailored for exhibiting specific properties. To those ends, Felix recently started a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Cambridge, where applying the models that he developed during his Ph.D. to discover new drugs and materials.

Margaretta Colangelo, Longevity Technology

Margaretta is Managing Editor at Longevity Technology. Longevity Technology is the world’s premier source for news and insights on research, investments, and technologies focused on extending healthy Longevity.

Margaretta is Co-founder & CEO of Jthereum. Jthereum is an Enterprise Blockchain technology company that transforms Java Developers into Blockchain Developers. With Jthereum, Java developers can use their existing Java programming skills to write smart contracts for the Ethereum platform.

Margaretta is President of U1 Technologies. U1 Technologies is an enterprise software company that provides the communications infrastructure for stock trading platforms used by some of the world’s top multinational investment banks. U1’s software is used at the core of large-scale stock trading applications to trade derivatives, bonds, foreign exchange, futures, options and swaps. U1 is privately held and has been profitable since 1999.

Petr Sramek, Longevitytech.fund

Petr Sramek is Managing Partner of Longevitytech.fund and co-founder of LongevityForum.eu. He is a serial entrepreneur in deep tech for more than 30 years. Petr is building science, funding and business infrastructure to support faster adoption of health-span improving technologies. Petr was Entrepreneur in Residence at Singularity University, co-founder of the Platform on Artificial Intelligence at the Confederation of Industry, AI Startup Incubator founder and a Senator for the Czech Republic in the World Business Angels Investment Forum (WBAF). Petr is also the founder of the AI Awards project. Petr has been featured in the group of 28 AI leaders in the flagship World Intellectual Property Organization study.

Arye Lipman, MarsBio

Arye is a General Partner at MarsBio, a seed stage venture fund based in Los Angeles, investing in deeptech and biotech companies. He holds a degree in Molecular and Cellular Biology from UCLA, and has a background in biotech R&D and drug development, entrepreneurship, and angel investing. He serves as a board member and advisor for various life sciences startups and accelerator programs in Southern California, including Empath Ventures, Lab Launch, and Larta Institute.

Adam Gries, Material World

Adam is a serial entrepreneur and software engineer; he has sold four companies and built apps and games on iOS and Facebook reaching over 80 million users. Having always been passionate about education he is now building products that help people learn on mobile devices.

Sourav Sinha, Longevity Vision Fund

Venture Partner, Head of Innovation
- Founder, CEO of Oncolinx
- Strategy at Celularity
- Forbes’ “30 Under 30: Healthcare”
- World Economic Forum Global Shaper
- Singularity University Global Solutions Program
- Dartmouth College

Seminar Summaries

You can find the recording, slides, and transcripts of our keynotes below.

Daniel Ives, Shift Bioscience
Drug Target Discovery for Cellular Rejuvenation by ‘Driver’ Clocks
View keynote summary >

Nir Barzilai, Albert Einstein School of Medicine
TAME Q&A: Lessons for Progress on Aging
View keynote summary >

Keith Murphy, Organovo, Viscient Biosciences
David Gobel, Methuselah Foundationt
Patient Trials in a Dish” Paths Forward
View keynote summary >

Morgan Levine, Yale
Jamie Justice, Wake Forest
Biomarker Standardization
View keynote summary >

Steve Horvath, UCLA
EpigeneticClocks: What’s New & What’s Missing?
View keynote summary >

Vadim Gladyshev, Harvard
Gordan Lauc, GlycanAge
Biomarker & Aging Clock Development
View keynote summary >

Alex Zhavoronkov, Deep Longevity & Insilico Medicine
Longevity as a Service: AI & Aging Clocks
View keynote summary >

Greg Fahy, Intervene Immune
Thymus Rejuvenation Progress Update
View keynote summary >

Christopher Leptak, CDER Biomarker Qualification Program, FDA
Biomarkers and Drug Development: Regulatory Perspective
View keynote summary >

James Peyer, Cambrian Biopharma
How to Fund and Build Geroprotectors
View keynote summary>

Ronald Kohanski, National Institute on Aging
Institutional perspective: What work could dramatically advance progress on aging from an NIA perspective?
View keynote summary >

James Kirkland, Mayo Clinic
Clinical Trials & Senolytics Q&A
View keynote summary >

Jean Hebert, Albert Einstein School of Medicine
Brain Cell Replacement as the Cornerstone to Beating Aging
View keynote summary >

Brian Kennedy, Buck Institute
Joris Deelen, Max Planck Institute for Aeging
Lynne Cox, Oxford University
Underincentivized Basic Research In Health Extension
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Irina Conboy, UC Berkeley
Tissue Rejuvenation via Plasma Dilution
View keynote summary >

Sonia Arrison, 100 Plus Capital
Karl Pfleger, Agingbiotech.info
Mike West, AgeX
Industry Blindspots for Dramatically Advancing Progress in Health Extension
View keynote summary >

Allison Duettmann, Foresight Institute
Sonia Arrison, 100 Plus Capital
Define 2021 Goals
View keynote summary >

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Upcoming Seminars: Areas for Progress

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