Bérénice Benayoun completed her undergraduate and graduate studies at the École Normale Supérieure of Paris and Paris Diderot University-Paris 7. Her doctoral work focused on a transcription factor whose mutations lead to a human syndrome associated with premature menopause. During her postdoctoral training, she identified a new key chromatin signature of cell identity and transcriptional consistency, which is partially remodeled during aging. This work has raised important questions about the stability of cellular identity throughout life. Her work also provided the first genome draft for the short-lived African turquoise killifish, a new vertebrate model for aging research. Benayoun joined the faculty of the University of Southern California in 2017, and in her lab she researches epigenome and transcriptome remodeling with aging in vertebrates, studying how these changes interact with overlooked cues such as biological sex and changes in levels of sex hormones, and exploring the roles these changes can play in modulating the aging process.
Projects:
Conserved regulatory pathways in age-related loss of plasticity and cognitive function