Areas of Specialty:
Brain aging
Stem cell regeneration
Killifish model
Anne Brunet, PhD
Anne Brunet is the Michele and Timothy Barakett Professor of Genetics and the Director of the Paul F. Glenn Laboratories for the Biology of Aging at Stanford University School of Medicine.
Dr. Brunet obtained her B.Sc. from the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and her Ph.D. from the University of Nice, France. She did her postdoctoral training with Dr. Michael Greenberg at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Brunet is interested in the molecular mechanisms of aging and longevity. Dr. Brunet’s laboratory has developed an original line of investigation to understand aging based on the integration of model organisms with diverse lifespans – worms, fish, and mice. Using the worm Caenorhabditis elegans, the Brunet lab has identified pathways involved in delaying aging in response to external stimuli such as availability of nutrients and availability of the opposite sex. She made the exciting discoveries that lifespan extension can be regulated by chromatin modifiers and inherited in a transgenerational epigenetic manner. Her lab also uses mouse models to address complex questions about mammalian aging, notably mechanisms regulating neural stem cell aging. Importantly, the Brunet lab has pioneered the naturally short-lived African killifish as a new model to identify principles underlying aging and ‘suspended animation’.
Dr. Brunet has published over 100 peer-reviewed papers and reviews. She has received several awards, including the Pfizer/AFAR Innovation in Aging Research Award and the Vincent Cristofalo “Rising Star” Award in Aging Research. She received a Pioneer Award and a Transformative Award from the NIH Director’s fund, which supports scientists who propose pioneering and transforming approaches to major challenges in biomedical research. In 2022, together with Dr. Andrew Dillin, she received the Lurie Prize in Biomedical Sciences.