Yousin Suh is the Charles and Marie Robertson professor of reproductive sciences in obstetrics and gynecology, professor of genetics and development, and director of reproductive aging at Columbia University. She investigates the (epi)genetic component that underlies the interface of intrinsic aging and disease. Her approach is based on the identification of (epi)genome sequence variants associated with age-related disease risk or its opposite, that is, an unusual resistance to such disease. Her target populations are either cohorts of middle-aged individuals followed longitudinally for signs of all major age-related diseases or cohorts of extremely long-lived individuals who managed to ward off such diseases. To tackle the key problem of identifying the functional impact of any observed association, she applies specific functional tests, including in silico modeling, cell culture assays and mouse models. Her discoveries so far include novel, rare alleles associated with extreme longevity, sirtuin variants that confer risk of heart disease, functional noncoding variants in the gene desert chromosome 9p21 locus underlying multiple age-related diseases, longevity-associated microRNAs, and epigenetic signatures of cellular senescence. Her contributions have been recognized with the Glenn Award for Research in Biological Mechanisms of Aging. She has organized numerous international symposiums on the functional genomics of aging, sits on the editorial boards of numerous journals including PLoS Genetics and Aging Cell as an associate editor, and is a member of advisory committees for several research institutions and companies.
Projects:
Conserved Regulatory Pathways in Age-related loss of Plasticity and Cognitive Function