My research career began in 1995 at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center with Dr. Paul Roepe. I worked there for about a year; I placed as a finalist based on the Westinghouse paper I submitted. My work was also published in Biochemistry [Abstract].

During my time at MIT, I worked at Merck for a summer, and worked for two terms with Dr. Dan Pack in the Langer Lab at MIT. I also worked for two summers at Los Alamos National Labs in the Nondestructive Testing and Evaluation Group. After graduation from MIT, I took a position in the Discovery Biology Group at Enanta Pharmaceuticals, working with John Benson. A patent application WO 03/040168 (Methods and Compositions for Identifying Peptide Aptamers Capable of Altering a Cell Phenotype) I'm on was recently published (pdf).

I did my graduate work in the Harvard BBS program. During my first year, I took a bunch of classes, including Micro 230, Genetics 201, BCMP 200 (Molecular Biology), BCMP 201 (Proteins), and Cell Biology 201. Students in the BBS program generally do three rotations before choosing a thesis lab, but I only did two. My first rotation was in the lab of Pam Silver. I studied protein methylation with Guillaume Adelmant, a postdoc. Working with Michael Yu, another postdoc, I also learned how to use microarrays.

I then rotated in the lab of David Sinclair, which I then joined in April of 2003. I studied the regulation of various genes related to aging, specifically concentrating on calorie restriction. I got my first paper from the Sinclair lab published in September 2003; we discovered that polyphenols such as resveratrol can activate sirtuins, extending the lifespan of budding yeast. Subsequent work by the Sinclair lab (i.e., Baur et al., 2006; Pearson et al., 2008) and others has demonstrated that resveratrol can protect mice from the effect of a high-fat diet and mimics some of the beneficial effects of calorie restriction, but resveratrol has not (yet) been shown to extend the lifespan of a mammal fed a normal diet. Work in this area is of course continuing. Subsequent to my work on resveratrol, I helped to discover a role for Hst2 in mediating the effects of calorie restriction, and a mechanism by which calorie restriction and TOR signaling regulate lifespan in yeast.My thesis committee, consisting of Pam Silver, Steve Buratowski, and Danesh Moazed, finally let me graduate in 2007.

I am currently a postdoc in the Sabatini lab at the Whitehead Institute adjacent to MIT, where I study the role of mTOR signaling in mammalian aging.