How I joined longevity research
Let me first summarize my own career path and how I ended up doing longevity and aging research
From theoretical physics to applied ai for longevity đź’»
- From early childhood I was excited about science in general, and math-heavy subjects specifically. I enjoyed reading books about biology, science, nature, etc.
- I changed a few schools, starting with one in my neighborhood, and gradually and stochastically descending towards three other grammar schools. I got admitted first to one focused on social sciences, and realized that it wasn’t something I was excited about.The other two were STEM-focused, and I found them way more exciting. I was lucky to have had amazing teachers who added more structure to my interest in learning. I am indebted to my teachers in my hometown’s lyceum.
- I had to pick one subject to focus on before graduating, and I decided to pursue physics — I also tried chemistry, computer science and maths, but physics felt more natural to me
- I did my undergrad/master’s in physics, particularly, in laser physics and nonlinear optics. I rotated in many labs, including biophysics where I was trying out some experimental work — I built a laser diffractometer of erythrocytes from scratch. It was somewhat fun to tinker with optics and lasers, but I quickly understood that I definitely enjoy abstract things more. I also tried two or three other labs focused on heavy computations, where I learnt to code and run high-performance parallelized simulations, inlucing OMP, MPI and CUDA/GPUs, etc.
- In parallel, I was looking for a part-time job, and ended up joining a small pharma company (Quantum Pharmaceuticals) that was about to pivot into aging research (and turning into Gero). it was in 2013, so I guess I’ve been in the field for over 11 years by now. A lot has changed in the field since then. Back then it was considered a completely cringy field swarming with snake oil sellers, though Calico (California Life Company) by Google was launched the same year focused to study aging and longevity. Of course, there were legitimate scientists studying aging in model organisms (yeast, worms, flies, etc.), but it was still considered utopian that we would be able to seriously intervene into human aging.
- I wouldn’t say it was an easy transition for me. It took more than 3 years to start producing any tangible results in aging. I interned for one summer in the lab of Alexey Moskalev studying aging in flies in my home town. I enjoyed that work, we were trying to find some associations between locomotor activity and lifespan/aging in various strains of fruit flies. Overall, I worked at Gero with Peter Fedichev for 8 years, learning from our own and other’s mistakes. He is also with a physics background, and we were struggling with the transitioning to aging simultaneously. We published a few papers on aging which I am very proud of. It was not easy, but I do think that we managed to formulate a decent and universal framework to approach aging. I’ll write about this more later.
- When I graduated from my undergrad/master’s programs in physics, I was at the crossroads between pursuing a PhD in physics or in biology. There was no PhD program in aging, and it was not an option at all. Not pursuing a PhD was also not an option — I enjoyed and enjoy research too much to not do it. I couldn’t live without learning/research and science, it was always my favorite drug of choice. After talking to a bunch of people I trust, I decided to finish my education in theoretical physics as a better field with clearer methods, theoretical and experimental grounding, reproducible results and a higher quality of education. I never regretted that decision, physics is fun, my PhD advisor Boris Fine was and is an amazing physicist. Though, physics is somewhat too conservative and slow for me — even compared to biology it’s slow (you can read more about my experience in longevity here). Physics is great for learning and teaching to think and to be a scientist, it’s definitely stagnating if you dream about relatively quick breakthroughs in science. There are always exceptions of course.
- At one longevity conference Vadim Gladyshev invited me to join his lab at Harvard, and spend some time doing aging research there. Of course, I agreed. It took more than two years to finish my PhD and obtain a J1 visa to start my postdoc (covid and closed embassies and borders significanly slowed that process).
- I spend a bit over a year in his lab investigating the nature of epigenetic aging on the single-cell level. It was also a fun project, which I enjoyed working on a lot. Simultaneously I filed my application for a green card, and when I received my temporary work permit, I decided to join compbio at retro (longevity startup focused on cellular therapies and epigenetic reprogramming).
- At retro, first I have been helping a few of our wetlab programs with data analysis. I dreamt of having more access to wetlab validations of computational biology, and at some point, we were offered such an opportunity and we span off applied ai team within retro. The premise of the team is to be fundamentally hybrid — no separation between wet and dry labs, everything is focused on iterating fast, and establishing clear tests for all our computational predictions, which would further fuel our next rounds of hypotheses. Our hypothesis is that such an approach can be superiour in performance and produced results to a more traditional wetlab driven one.
- … we will see where I’ll be in a few months/years from now!