Date/Time
Date(s) - Wednesday, October 18, 2017
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm

Location
Biotech Without Borders

Categories No Categories

A Talk by Dr. Oliver Medvedik

Must we grow old and die? Understanding how and why we age and, by extension, devising a “cure” for our own mortality,has long been part of humanity’s quest since earliest recorded history. In the relatively short period of time that tools of molecular biology have been developed, they have now been applied to questions of aging and longevity with incredibly fruitful results. These findings, along with their application to new classes of therapeutics being developed to inhibit and even reverse aging, will be discussed.

Dr. Oliver Medvedik, TED Fellow and open-source synthetic biologist and director of the Maurice Kanbar Center for Biomedical Research at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. He is cofounder and Vice President of the Life Extension Advocacy Foundation, a nonprofit organization that maintains a crowdfunding platform Lifespan.io for funding of longevity and life extension research. Dr. Medvedik’s career stems in part from his doctoral work in which he used single-celled budding yeast as a genetic system to map pathways that underlie the processes of aging in complex organisms, such as humans. Since then, he has worked as a consultant for Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, a biotechnology company specializing in the research and development of small- molecule therapeutics to treat age-onset diseases. He obtained his bachelor’s degree in biology from Hunter College, City University of New York, in 1998, and holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. from Harvard Medical School in the Biomedical and Biological Sciences program.