Ageing is the major biomedical challenge of the 21st century, yet it remains largely mysterious, partly because the ageing process involves multiple genes and their interactions with each other and with the environment that remain poorly understood. Our work has focused on various high-throughput genomic approaches aimed at deciphering the genome and increasing our knowledge about how genes and pathways impact on ageing. Dietary manipulations of ageing are also of immense interest, which we have been studying using a combination of computational and experimental approaches in model organisms ranging from yeast to rats. Lastly, I will discuss our recent work in sequencing and analyzing the genome of the longest-lived mammal, the bowhead whale, to identify longevity assurance mechanisms.

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Speaker Profile

João Pedro graduated in Microbiology in Portugal. As a doctoral fellow, he studied the mechanisms of aging by joining the Aging and Stress Group at the University of Namur in Namur, Belgium. Fascinated by the genome and by the opportunities its sequencing opened, João Pedro then did a postdoc from 2004 to 2008 with genomics pioneer George Church at Harvard Medical School in Boston, USA. He developed high-throughput approaches for studying aging, including computational tools and databases, statistical models of mortality, and comparative genomics methods for investigating the evolution of longevity.

In 2008, he joined the Institute of Integrative Biology at the University of Liverpool as a Lecturer to develop his own group on genomic approaches to aging. "