American Federation for Aging Research

Thank you to all who attended our 2026 Grantee Conference in Santa Barbara! AFAR is inspired by the ideas shared and is proud to have supported the range of research presented.

Thank you to the supporters of our grant programs, including the Glenn Foundation for Medical Research, McKnight Brain Research Foundation, Hevolution Foundation, The James A. and Dorothy R. Brunn Foundation, The Irene Diamond Fund, The Charina Foundation, Hearst Foundations, David W. Gore, The Lowell F. Johnson Foundation, Diana Jacobs Kalman, Diane Nixon Fund, Irving Kahn fund, Sami Sagol, WoodNext Foundation, The Irving S. Wright Endowment and AFAR’s Board of Directors.

View from AFAR: Championing Your Health, Reimagining Aging

As we close the month of May, AFAR recognizes National Older Americans Month. The theme of this year’s commemoration is “Champion Your Health,” and championing your health is precisely what we do at AFAR. It’s in our DNA. For nearly half a century, we’ve supported scientific research on aging in order to help us all live healthier, longer.
AFAR experts talk about this in “Age Reimagined,” a recently launched branded content series presented by the Global Coalition on Aging and produced for GCOA by BBC StoryWorks Commercial Productions. AFAR Scientific Director Steven N. Austad, PhD, describes:
“The world is aging. It's aging more quickly than it ever has done in the 300,000-year history of our species.
At AFAR, we want to create a bigger cadre of bright, young scientists to make advances in understanding geroscience and in developing new therapies to keep us young and healthy longer.
Right now, it's an extremely collaborative field, and usually, when you get bright people working on different things together, good things happen.
In the next five to 10 years, we're going to see remarkable advances in how we can measure aging itself, and that's critically important, because if we want to intervene and impact that biology, we need to measure it.
To the extent that we're successful at intervening in the aging process, we would reimagine the whole trajectory of human life.”
At AFAR, every month is Older Americans Month, and it has been for 45 years.
See more of Dr. Austad in AFAR’s “Age Reimagined” short film, and dig deeper in an accompanying, illustrated feature article, here: https://www.bbc.com/storyworks/age-reimagined/afar-exploring-disease-biology-and-the-evolving-role-of-geroscience-in-ageing-research?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=age_reimagined

At Day 2 of today, we heard from Director of Bakar Aging Research Institute at the University of California, San Francisco, Leanne Jones, PhD, and Dinner Speaker Peter Hotez, MD, PhD, Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine and a Professor of Pediatrics and Molecular Virology & Microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine.

The AFAR Grantee Poster Session is beginning now!

Next up at is Corina Amor Vegas, MD, PhD, of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, to speak on “Deconstructing aging with senolytic CAR T cells.”

We've kicked off day 2 of AFAR’s Grantee Conference and are honored to have Irving Wright award recipient Pinchas Cohen, MD, presenting on “Mitochondrial Microproteins in Aging and Longevity.” Next up, Daniel Jarosz, PhD, Senior Associate Dean for Basic Science at Stanford Medicine, speaking on “Molecular drivers of resilience in stress and aging.”

Our annual grantee conference convenes past and current grantees to share insights. Among today’s presenters:
2022 BIG Award recipient Edward Chouchani, PhD
2023 McKnight Grantees Denise Cai, PhD, and Christoph Thaiss, PhD.
Check out tomorrow's schedule here:https://www.afar.org/imported/docs/2026-PROGRAM-BOOK.pdf

The 39th Annual AFAR Grantee Conference begins now! Looking forward to opening remarks Kevin Lee, PhD, of the Glenn Foundation for Medical Research and then a presentation by AFAR Board President Thomas Rando, MD, PhD, on “Stem Cell Aging: Evolutionary Trade-Offs and Survivorship Bias”.

AFAR is thrilled to kick off this year’s Paul F. Glenn/AFAR Conference on The Biology of Aging and the 39th Annual AFAR Grantee Conference in Santa Barbara, California.
Explore presenters and topics here:https://www.afar.org/imported/docs/2026-PROGRAM-BOOK.pdf