Aditi Gurkar was awarded $375,000 to research healthy aging

Aditi Gurkar, assistant professor in Pitt’s School of Medicine and Aging Institute, is a recipient of an inaugural New Investigator Award in Aging Biology and Geroscience Research from Hevolution and the American Federation for Aging Research.

Gurkar is one of 18 scientists from around the world who will receive $375,000 over three years to support research that addresses the biology of aging and age-related disease to promote healthy aging. Her project, “A Nanoscale Detection Tool for Senescence,” will develop new approaches to identify and map senescent cells, a type of dysfunctional cell that accumulates with age and drives inflammation and disease, to better understand the mechanisms of aging and develop new strategies to improve healthspan.

As a faculty member of Pitt’s Division of Geriatric Medicine, Gurkar’s research on identifying signal mechanisms that drive aging has been twice funded by the National Institute of Aging, part of the National Institutes of Health.