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The GMGI Science Hour with Dr. Steven Austad

"Methuselah's Zoo: What Nature Can Teach Us about Living Longer, Healthier Lives"

This talk will describe diverse animal species whose long lives and basic biology offer clues to improving our own lives. This is a novel paradigm for aging research - diametric opposite to the standard practice. Instead of using short-lived species that are demonstrably unsuccessful at combating aging to try to discover interventions to enhance and prolong human health, this approach employs animals that are demonstrably superior to humans at combating aging and seeks to discover their secrets of successful aging to be translated to human benefit.

Steven Austad is the Protective Life Endowed Chair in Healthy Aging Research in Department of Biology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). He is also Founding Director and current Co-director of UAB’s Nathan Shock Center of Excellence in the Basic Biology of Aging and Senior Scientific Director of the New York-based American Federation for Aging Research. Having published more than 200 scientific papers, Dr. Austad’s aging research has won multiple awards, including the Nathan A. Shock Award, the Robert W. Kleemeier Award, the Purdue Outstanding Alumnus Award, the Fondation IPSEN Longevity Prize, and the Irving S. Wright Award of Distinction. He is a fellow of the Gerontological Society of America and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. With an abiding interest in communicating science to the general public, he has served on the Scientific Advisory Board of National Public Radio and written more than 150 op-eds and essays for electronic and print media, including the Huffington Post, The Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, and Salon. He has also written four books - most recently Methuselah’s Zoo: What Nature Can Teach Us about Living Longer, Healthier Lives (2022). Before his career in science, he put food on the table by driving taxis in New York City and training lions for the Hollywood movie industry.

Feb 2, 2023 07:00 PM in Eastern Time (US and Canada)