Georgetown Lombardi Visiting Professor and Grand Rounds Lecture Series Featuring Daniel Belsky, PhD
“Quantification of Biological Aging”
Presented by:
Daniel Belsky, PhD
Assistant Professor
Butler Columbia Aging Center and Department of Epidemiology
Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health
Sponsor: Jeanne Mandelblatt, MD
Dan Belsky is an assistant professor at the Butler Columbia Aging Center and Department of Epidemiology at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. He was an Early-Career Fellow of the Jacobs Foundation and is a current Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Child Brain Development Network and the University of Oslo PROMENTA Center.
Dan works at the intersection of the social and behavioral sciences, genomics, and public health. His focus for the past several years has been on development and evaluation of methods to quantify the biological process of aging in young, mid-life, and older-adult humans and the application of these methods to study (1) how life-history and social factors contribute to individual differences in healthy aging; and (2) whether and how aging processes can be modified by intervention.
With collaborators Terrie Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi he originated the Pace of Aging method to quantify the aging process from longitudinal analysis of human physiology and recently translated this method into a DNA-methylation blood test that can be implemented from a single time point of data collection. He is principal investigator of NIH-funded projects to generate multi-omics databases for the CALERIE randomized trial and the Dutch Hunger Winter Family Study to test how caloric restriction and early developmental insult may affect biological aging.
His foundation- and Columbia-supported projects include investigations of how social determinants of health affect biological aging and the potential geroprotective effects of social policy interventions. Since 2020, he has been named an ISI highly-cited researcher.
Lecture Series Presented by Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center