Mair Lab
The Mair lab investigates why aging increases susceptibility to chronic diseases. We explore how nutrition and environment affect aging rates, noting benefits of fasting and reduced food intake in extending health span across species. We study genetic pathways linking metabolism and aging, aiming to replicate benefits of dietary restriction without its drawbacks. Our research spans from yeast to humans, leveraging evolutionary conservation to understand and potentially mitigate human aging processes.
665 Huntington Avenue
Building 1, Room 512
Boston, MA 02115
Why Study Aging?
Understanding aging’s molecular deterioration processes is key to developing therapies for prevalent age-related disorders and addressing growing health care burdens from longer lifespans.
Aging occurs universally across evolution and is the primary risk factor for neurodegenerative diseases, cancers, and metabolic disorders in elderly humans. Our lab aims to understand the molecular pathways underlying the aging process with the goal of designing novel therapeutic strategies.
While public health advances have dramatically increased life expectancy over the last century, living longer has also increased the prevalence of chronic age-onset diseases in elderly patients, often affecting multiple systems. Therefore, if one of public health’s greatest successes has been to add years to human lives, the next challenge is making those extra years healthy. Determining the causal cellular and molecular changes that deteriorate with age and drive disease susceptibility is critical to meet growing health care needs from aging populations globally.