Matt Kaeberlein got into studying the science of longevity “by accident,” he says.
Kaeberlein is the founder and former director of the Healthy Aging and Longevity Research Institute at the University of Washington, and the co-founder and CEO of a health tech startup called Optispan. Throughout his career, he’s published hundreds of research papers, including many about aging.
In 1998, as a graduate student studying biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Kaeberlein attended a biology professor’s lecture about genetics and its connection to longevity, he says. “I was in my late 20s, so aging wasn’t personal yet, but the complexity of the biology just really resonated with me. It seemed like an important problem,” says Kaeberlein, 54.
Kaeberlein joined the professor, Leonard Guarente, in his lab and decided to conduct his graduate research on longevity. “Now, much of my attention is focused on individual people and learning how we can have a positive impact on people’s health span,” says Kaeberlein.
A health span — similar to a lifespan — is defined as how long you live without conditions that can hinder your quality of life, like chronic pain and dementia, Alan Cohen, an associate professor at the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center at Columbia University, told CNBC Make It in December 2022.
