Professor Chiara Herzog
Chiara Herzog, PhD is a Group Leader and Assistant Research Professor at the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute, University of Cambridge, and a member of the Executive Committee of the Biomarkers of Aging Consortium. A systems biologist working at the interface of computational and experimental biology, she investigates how epigenetic regulation — particularly DNA methylation — shapes aging and age-related disease.
As Principal Investigator of the Herzog Lab, Chiara studies how the epigenome records past exposures, present cellular state, and future disease risk, developing robust biomarkers to monitor individual biological aging and exploring how targeted interventions can modulate these processes.
Chiara’s independent research programme is supported by a Wellcome Trust Career Development Award. In 2026, she was awarded £5.79 million to lead epiPRIME (Epigenetically Programmed Resilience through Innate Memory Engineering), a six-institution project within the Sustained Viral Resilience programme of the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) that aims to engineer the innate immune system to provide durable, broad-spectrum protection against respiratory viruses. Read King’s Joins £5.79M Team to Boost Viral Immunity.
As a member of the Executive Committee of the Biomarkers of Aging Consortium — a global, multidisciplinary effort to establish consensus and standards for biomarkers of aging — Chiara has coauthored several of the field’s defining publications. She is a co-first author of Biomarkers of aging for the identification and evaluation of longevity interventions, published in Cell in 2023, and of Validation of biomarkers of aging, published in Nature Medicine in 2024, both of which set out frameworks for evaluating -omic biomarkers of aging and accelerating their clinical translation. She vice-chairs the 2026 Biomarkers of Aging Conference at Harvard Medical School.
Much of Chiara’s work translates epigenetic signals into non-invasive tools for early cancer detection and disease prevention. She led Systems epigenetic approach towards non-invasive breast cancer detection, published in Nature Communications in 2025, which compared DNA methylation across cervical, buccal, and blood samples to derive classifiers for breast cancer detection.
Her study Cigarette smoking and e-cigarette use induce shared DNA methylation changes linked to carcinogenesis, published in Cancer Research in 2024, found that e-cigarette users experience epigenetic changes in cheek cells similar to those of smokers and linked to later lung cancer development, drawing wide media coverage. Read Vaping causes the same DNA changes as smoking, scientists find.
With Professor Martin Widschwendter, she co-led the TirolGESUND study (NCT05678426), a longitudinal, multi-omic study profiling the effects of intermittent fasting and smoking cessation across multiple tissues, which produced the Multi-modal atlas of lifestyle interventions reveals malleability of ageing-linked molecular features, showing that aging-linked molecular features are selectively malleable, with highly compliant intermittent-fasting participants exhibiting age-opposing molecular trajectories within six months.
Before joining Cambridge, Chiara was a King’s Prize Fellow at King’s College London from 2024 to 2026, where she established her independent research group and was awarded the Prof. Anthony Mellows Medal. Between 2020 and 2026, she led the computational biology team at the European Translational Oncology Prevention and Screening (EUTOPS) Institute at the University of Innsbruck, specializing in high-dimensional DNA methylation analysis.
There she developed epigenetic predictors that led to multiple patents and a clinically available test for endometrial cancer, the WID-qEC test, which was evaluated against ultrasound in the prospective EPI-SURE cohort study published in The Lancet Oncology in 2023. From 2019 to 2020, she worked as an associate business development manager at the precision-diagnostics company BioClavis in Glasgow.
Chiara earned her PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Edinburgh in 2019, with a thesis on the molecular and cellular mechanisms of microglia-mediated neuroprotection titled Molecular and cellular mechanisms of microglia-mediated neuroprotection. Her doctoral research, conducted in Dr. Leah Herrgen’s laboratory, established a larval-zebrafish model of traumatic brain injury and demonstrated that rapid clearance of cellular debris by microglia limits secondary neuronal cell death, published as Rapid clearance of cellular debris by microglia limits secondary neuronal cell death after brain injury in vivo in Development in 2019.
She earned her MSc in Integrative Neuroscience from the University of Edinburgh in 2015 with distinction, and her BSc in Molecular Medicine from the Medical University of Innsbruck in 2014 with distinction, graduating top of her class at the age of 19 after completing secondary school at 16.
Beyond her primary roles, Chiara serves on the scientific advisory board of Aniva Health and as a scientific board member of the Aeon Foundation. Her honors include being named a Rising Star at the 2025 Longevity Summit Dublin, the Austrian Association of Molecular Life Sciences and Biotechnology (ÖGMBT) Life Science Award in Basic Science in 2024 — the most prestigious award for an early-career life scientist in Austria — the AGO Young Scientist Award in 2024, the Prof. Ernst Brandl Prize in 2023, and the Falling Walls Lab Austria award in 2020.
A frequent keynote speaker on biomarkers of aging, she has presented at the Longevity Summit Dublin and at Foresight Institute Vision Weekends, and she was an invited keynote speaker at the 2022 Young European Scientist Meeting alongside Nobel laureates Drew Weissman and William Kaelin.
Watch Biomarkers of Aging, Epigenetics & Healthspan Research, Dr. Chiara Herzog on Biomarkers & Aging Trajectories | Longevity Education Hub Webinar Series, What The Epigenome Remembers: Ageing, Disease Risk, and the Tissues we Overlook, From Aging to Cancer Risk in Epigenetics with Dr. Chiara Herzog, and The Path to Biomarker Standardization.
Listen to The Biomarkers of Aging Bottleneck with Dr. Chiara Herzog.
Chiara is based in Cambridge and speaks English and French.
Visit her personal website, her Cambridge Stem Cell Institute profile, her LinkedIn profile, Google Scholar page, ORCID page, and GitHub profile. Follow her on Facebook, Instagram, and X.