Professor Georges Janssens
Georges Janssens, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor in the Laboratory Genetic Metabolic Diseases at the Amsterdam University Medical Center working on Therapeutics and Diagnostics for Healthy Aging. He is also Research Associate at Amsterdam Gastroenterology Endocrinology Metabolism and in the Laboratory for General Clinical Chemistry.
Georges is passionate about developing healthy aging diagnostics and interventions that are accessible to the public. His work is focused on multi-omics data integration studying the molecular determinants of healthy aging.
Read Biological Age Prediction From Wearable Device Movement Data Identifies Nutritional and Pharmacological Interventions for Healthy Aging and MyHeBu (My Health Buddy), a wearable device-based and AI-powered digital twin to track your health and aging. Watch Pre-finalist of the Amsterdam Science & Innovation Award Georges Janssens: MyHeBu (My Health Buddy).
Georges earned his Ph.D. in System Biology of Aging in 2016 from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, at the European Research Institute for the Biology of Ageing (ERIBA). His thesis was titled A system wide view of replicative aging in budding yeast: Protein biogenesis machinery as a driver of the aging process; molecular and cellular properties associated to longevity in single cells; and the relevance of aging in yeast to aging in humans.
During his postdoctoral work at the Karolinska Institute between 2016 and 2017, he pioneered transcriptome-based machine-learning-enabled drug screening, an approach he continues to expand upon today in his independent research line. Read Transcriptomics-Based Screening Identifies Pharmacological Inhibition of Hsp90 as a Means to Defer Aging.
Georges followed up his Postdoc research with a Senior Postdoc position at the Amsterdam University Medical Center, working on mechanisms, markers, and interventions in aging.
Georges has been awarded several prestigious fellowships including the FEBS in 2017 and the VENI in 2019. He has authored over 30 publications, with recent first authorships in journals including Cell Metabolism and Cell Reports, and recent corresponding authorships in journals including EMBO Molecular Medicine and Biogerontology.
Read his key publications Pharmaceutical and nutraceutical activation of FOXO3 for healthy longevity, Inhibition of the neuromuscular acetylcholine receptor with atracurium activates FOXO/DAF-16-induced longevity, and Healthy aging and muscle function are positively associated with NAD+ abundance in humans.
He writes a popular science blog Aging Is Beautiful, that distills myths about aging. A website he started in 2017 is dedicated to the science and philosophy of aging, with information on the basic science behind aging, how to achieve a healthy lifespan, and how you can accurately measure your biological age. Read Your typical day on your way to 120.
Georges earned his double major Bachelor’s Degree of Science in Genetics and Philosophy in 2007 from the University of California, Davis, where he is originally from. He moved to the Netherlands, where he earned his Master’s Degree of Science in Biomedical Science from the University of Utrecht in 2009.
After his Master’s, Georges did a six-month internship at the University of Liverpool working on the Genomics of Aging. His work primarily consisted of creating shRNA vectors used to silence specific genes, creating viruses from these constructs to infect Mouse ESCs, and observing the effects of each shRNA on cellular proliferation in the context of aging.
He was invited to speak at the Centre for Healthy Longevity conference at NUS, Singapore. His talk was about ‘unlocking the potential of supplements for a healthier, longer life’. He was also invited to The Eurosymposium on Healthy Ageing (EHA) biennial meeting of scientists working on the biology of aging.
Watch How Wearables Can Predict Your Biological Aging and Georges Janssens presents at ARDD 2021.
Read Limitations and possibilities of small RNA digital gene expression profiling, Mitochondrial fission and fusion: A dynamic role in aging and potential target for age-related disease, and Next-generation sequencing in aging research: emerging applications, problems, pitfalls and possible solutions.
Read Protein biogenesis machinery is a driver of replicative aging in yeast and The Digital Ageing Atlas: integrating the diversity of age-related changes into a unified resource. Read How much protein should I have in my diet? and follow his Contributions on Medium.
Visit his LinkedIn profile, ResearchGate page, and his Academic page. Follow him on Facebook, Google Scholar, ORCiD, and Twitter.
