Author Bio

About Jan Vijg

Jan Vijg is Professor and Chairman of the Department of Genetics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York since July, 2008. Born and raised in The Netherlands he has always been interested in history and biology. Eventually, he opted for a study in biology at the University of Leiden, The Netherlands, where he received a Ph.D. in 1987. He then moved to the US in 1993 and was an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School until 1999. He was a Professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio from 1999 to 2005, and a Professor at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Novato, CA, from 2005 to 2008. He published well over 300 scientific articles, many in top journals, such as Nature, Science and Cell, and three books. Some of his work has had high impact. For example, his 2016 paper in Nature entitled “Evidence for a limit to human life span” ranked second of the 1,036 tracked articles of a similar age in Nature and is in the top 5% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric. His work has always been focused to a large extent on the development of new technology. He is the inventor or co-inventor on 8 patents and a founder of several biotech companies as well as the founding director of the Center for Single-Cell Omics (CSCOmics) at Jiaotong University School of Medicine in Shanghai, China (2019). He is the recipient of the Schreuder Award of the Netherlands Society of Gerontology (1987), the Nathan Shock New Investigator Award of The Gerontological Society of America (1994) and the Irving Wright Award of Distinction of the American Federation for Aging Research (2012). He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) technology and his research has been continuously funded by the NIH since 1993.