About the series
Join us for the new Frontiers in EL Research virtual lecture series, a quarterly event committed to the principles of open, reproducible, and data-driven science. Hosted by the ELITE Portal team at Sage Bionetworks and the Longevity Consortium, this series will showcase speakers at the forefront of advancing healthspan and lifespan research.
The intended audience is graduate students, postdocs, principal investigators, industry scientists, and educators.
May 1, 2026 at 9AM PT
Prizing Healthy Aging: New Ideas in the Science & Support of Healthspan
Speaker: Jamie Justice, PhD
Recording | Slides
September 1, 2026 at 9AM PT
Models for Discovering Novel Anti-aging Products and Processes
Speaker: Steven Austad, PhD
November 12, 2026 at 10AM PT
Epigenetic Clocks 2026: From Molecular Mechanisms to Clinical Translation
Speaker: Steve Horvath, PhD
February 3, 2027 at 10AM PT
Cellular Models of Neural Aging and Disease
Speaker: Rusty Gage, PhD
Meet the Speakers
Jamie Justice, PhD
Dr. Jamie Justice is the Executive Vice President Health Domain and Executive Director of the $101M Healthspan Prize at the nonprofit XPRIZE Foundation, and adjunct faculty in Internal Medicine at Wake Forest University School of Medicine (WFUSM). Jamie completed graduate and postdoc training at University of Colorado Boulder before joining faculty at WFUSM. Jamie’s scientific work is dedicated to geroscience, an emerging field that seeks to change the way we think about and treat aging, by looking at the biologic root to proactively reduce the incidence of multiple age-related diseases, functional decline, and disability. She was the recipient of the Jarrahi Research Scholars Fund in Geroscience Innovation, the 2022 Vincent Cristofalo Rising Star in Aging Research, and NIA Nathan W Shock Awardee.
Dr. Justice’s leadership at XPRIZE uses a competition model to drive capital to innovation and catalyze transformative solutions to optimize health for all, advance personalized approaches, and ignite breakthroughs in biotechnology and biomedicine. She leads the $101M XPRIZE Healthpsan global competition to incentivize teams from around the world to develop and demonstrate innovative therapeutic solutions that make healthy human aging possible. Dr. Justice also leads the design and development of future prizes for breakthroughs in health, including a new in-design program to improve ovarian function and support women’s health across the lifespan, prevent suicide and mental health crises, advance biomarkers for personalized medicine and trials, and champion novel AI-based computing challenges to support better health outcomes for everyone.
Steven Austad, PhD
Dr. Steven N. Austad is a Distinguished Professor and the Protective Life Endowed Chair in Healthy Aging Research at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he also co-directs the NIH-funded Nathan Shock Center of Excellence. As the Scientific Director of the American Federation for Aging Research, he has spent over 30 years studying the biological processes of aging. His current research focuses on sex differences in aging and how these interactions impact disease vulnerability and human healthspan.
A prolific author and scholar, Dr. Austad has published over 220 scientific papers and seven books, including Methuselah’s Zoo. His work has earned him prestigious accolades such as the Irving S. Wright Award of Distinction and the Nathan A. Shock Award from the National Institute on Aging. He is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a frequent science communicator for National Public Radio and major museums across the United States.
Dr. Austad’s path to becoming a world-renowned gerontologist was highly unconventional. Before earning his PhD in evolutionary ecology, he held a degree in English literature and worked as a Hollywood animal trainer, a newspaper reporter, a New York City taxi driver, and a professional pool hustler. This diverse background informs his global field research, which has spanned from the United States to Papua New Guinea.
Steve Horvath, PhD
Dr. Steve Horvath is a geroscientist whose research bridges the fields of biomarkers, precision medicine, genomics, and comparative biology. Dr. Horvath is a Full Professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and founding Principal Investigator at Altos Labs. Widely recognized for his groundbreaking work on epigenetic aging clocks, Dr. Horvath developed the first multi-tissue epigenetic clock in 2013, which allows for the estimation of biological age across diverse human tissues. His research trajectory began with the publication of the first saliva-based epigenetic clock in 2011, continued with second-generation clocks for predicting mortality risk, and culminated in 2023 with his team’s development of the universal pan-mammalian clock: a single mathematical formula capable of measuring aging across all mammalian species. Beyond his academic research, Dr. Horvath founded the non-profit Epigenetic Clock Development Foundation. He has been named on Clarivate’s annual list of the world’s most influential scientific researchers every year since 2018.
Rusty Gage, PhD
Dr. Gage is the Adler Professor in the Laboratory of Genetics, and immediate past President of the Salk Institute, and an Adjunct Professor, UCSD. He received his Ph.D. from The Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Gage’s work concentrates on the adult central nervous system and unexpected plasticity and adaptability to environmental stimulation that remains throughout the life of all mammals. In addition, he models human neurological and psychiatric disease in vitro using human stem cells. His lab also studies the genomic mosaicism that exists in the brain as a result of mobile elements that are active during neurogenesis.
Dr. Gage is a Fellow of the AAAS, a Member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine, and American Philosophical Society, a foreign member of the EMBO and a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He served as President of the Society for Neuroscience in 2002, and of the International Society for Stem Cell Research in 2012.
Meet the organizers
Contact us at eliteportal@sagebase.org
Nicholas Schork
Moderator
Longevity Consortium
Milan Vu
Series Coordination & Promotion
ELITE Portal, Sage Bionetworks
Solly Sieberts
ELITE Portal, Sage Bionetworks