Mellon Longevity Graduate Scholars Loren Kell and Maria Kyriazi along with Romuald Binet and Jasmine Murdoch-Vilaplana organised a young International Cell Senescence Association (yICSA) conference at Oriel College, Oxford.
The conference, which took place over two days in March, was attended by over 100 early career researchers from around the globe, and involved a range of talks and poster presentations.
Dr Satomi Miwa, Newcastle University, and Dr Marta Kovatcheva, Institute for Research in Biomedicine, Barcelona, delivered keynote addresses.
DPhil students at Oriel College Kell and Kyriazi are both supervised by George Moody Fellow Associate Professor Lynne Cox, a principal investigator at the Department of Biochemistry, University of Oxford.
They said: “We are delighted by the high-quality content of the talks, that showed us how thorough and proactive the incoming generation of scientists is.
“It was also a chance to meet fellows from across the world and bridge new networks. The future of the longevity field seems very promising!”
A fourth-year DPhil student in Biochemistry, Kell is investigating the role of senescence in the immune system, and how targeting these ageing pathways can rejuvenate immunity in older people. She is supervised by Professor Katja Simon and Dr Ghada Alsaleh as well as by Cox.
Kyriazi, a first-year DPhil student in Molecular and Cellular Medicine supervised by Alsaleh and Cox, is researching the role of senescence and autophagy, a mechanism of cellular degradation, in osteoarthritis. Her aim, she said, is to understand the role of ageing in the disease and identify drug targets that can be used to develop therapeutics.
More information:
Senescence, a process by which cells “age” in response to damage, plays a role in ageing, cancer and infection.
yICSA is an offshoot of the International Cell Senescence Association (ICSA) for PhD students and postdoctoral researchers. ICSA was founded in 2012, originally as the European Cell Senescence Association, to bring together scientists researching cell senescence, a segment of the broader field of longevity research.
The Mellon Longevity Graduate Scholarship at Oriel College was established in 2020 as part of the Mellon Longevity Science Programme aimed at helping the most vulnerable in society by advancing research into health resilience in ageing populations.
Oriel College has a history of hosting conferences on the aging process and senescence, including for the British Society for Research on Aging and UK Ageing Network.