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Pankaj Kapahi is a Professor and aging researcher whose laboratory seeks to understand why organisms age and why the rate and consequences of aging differ so dramatically between individuals, sexes, and species. The lab approaches aging through the lens of evolution, asking how pathways that evolved to optimize growth, reproduction, and survival early in life can shape health and disease later in life.

A major focus of the laboratory is the interaction between nutrition, metabolism, reproduction, and aging. The lab has helped define how nutrient-sensing pathways, including TOR, dietary restriction, circadian biology, and metabolic adaptation regulate lifespan and age-related disease. More recently, this work has expanded to reproductive aging and the Reproductive Resilience Hypothesis, the idea that evolutionary pressures linking reproductive success to prolonged survival, repeated reproduction, and caregiving may have selected for biological programs that simultaneously support reproduction and somatic resilience.

Using comparative and experimental approaches across flies, worms, mice, and humans, the lab studies how these evolutionarily conserved programs influence brain aging, neurodegeneration, metabolic disease, reproductive aging, cell senescence, and resilience. The broader philosophy of the laboratory is that aging is best understood not as an isolated biological program, but as an emergent consequence of the evolutionary trade-offs among reproduction, nutrition, growth, maintenance, and survival.

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