Serena Kern-Libera, LL.M.
Serena Kern-Libera, LL.M., is the Cofounder, Chief Operating Officer, and General Counsel of LinkGevity, an AI-driven longevity biotechnology company she established with her sister, the geneticist Dr. Carina Kern.
A lawyer, strategist, and entrepreneur, Serena has built an unorthodox career spanning corporate law, government trade and economic policy, biotechnology, education outreach, and music. After more than a decade in private practice and senior public-sector roles, she stepped away from a successful policy career to cofound LinkGevity, drawn by the opportunity to have a direct and immediate impact on people’s health.
LinkGevity is a trailblazing biotechnology company at the intersection of artificial intelligence and longevity science. The company’s mission is rooted in the belief that aging can be addressed at its biological source.
As Chief Operating Officer and General Counsel, Serena leads the company’s commercial, legal, and operational strategy. Guided by the novel Blueprint Theory of Aging, the company identifies molecular pathways that drive aging and age-related diseases. LinkGevity’s Anti-Necrotic™ program has received significant institutional and government support, including a Horizon Europe grant from the European Union, a Smart Grant from Innovate UK, the UK government’s national innovation agency, and equity investment from the Francis Crick Institute through its celebrated KQ Labs Programme, for which only 10 startups are selected annually after a rigorous due diligence process. LinkGevity was also selected for the inaugural NASA/Microsoft Space-H Accelerator program due to its potential to alleviate accelerated ageing in astronauts. Their work has had prominent features in The Financial Times, BBC News, Sky News and The Times.
The company’s research is set out in the review Necrosis as a fundamental driver of loss of resilience and biological decline: what if we could intervene?, published in Springer Nature’s journal Oncogene.
The company's origins stem from Serena and her sister, Dr Kern, witnessing their grandmother's rapid decline due to age-related illness, highlighting the urgent need for new therapeutic approaches. Read in the BBC: Could the death of these women’s grandmother help us all to live longer?
Before founding LinkGevity, Serena spent her early career as a corporate mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer at the Magic Circle firm Slaughter and May, where she advised clients across the healthcare, retail, and pharmaceutical sectors — including on the recommended combination of Mediclinic International with Al Noor Hospitals Group, Compagnie Financière Richemont’s merger of The Net-A-Porter Group with YOOX, and DONG Energy’s £350 million sale of the Severn power station. She then moved into public service, joining the Bank of England in 2016 as Legal Counsel in its EU Withdrawal Division before becoming Lead Trade Policy Adviser and then Deputy Head of Global Trade Strategy.
Between 2021 and 2024 she was Head of Market Access Policy at HM Treasury on secondment from the Bank, where she also acted as private secretary — effectively chief of staff — to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. In 2020, while serving at the Bank of England, Serena won the Business category of the Asian Women of Achievement Awards, which honour women of Asian origin who make a positive contribution to society in the UK.
Serena is a committed advocate for education and equality of opportunity. With her sister she cofounded Discover2Dream, a London-based initiative that brings young professionals — mainly women — into schools to raise students’ career aspirations.
She sits on the board of SkillSonics International AG, a multinational social enterprise delivering Swiss-model vocational education and training, and between 2020 and 2024 she served as a director of the Small Countries Financial Management Centre, a charity that runs training programmes for officials from the world’s 30 smallest economies. From 2017 to 2023 she was a governor of the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School, a girls’ secondary school in Islington, London.
Away from her professional work, Serena is an accomplished musician who records and performs under the stage name Segiri. Her dance-pop music has received strong radio support, including from the BBC Asian Network and BBC Radio, and her single Undone reached number 13 on the Swiss Top 100 Dance Chart. She founded and runs D2D Records, a boutique social-enterprise label dedicated to mentoring and platforming emerging young female artists.
Serena earned her Bachelor of Laws (LLB) from The London School of Economics and Political Science in 2010 and a Master of Laws (LLM) in Public International Law, with Distinction, from the University of London in 2019; which she completed while at the Bank of England. She grew up in Tamil Nadu, India, where she achieved the highest GCSE score in the country before moving to London.
Read Not inevitable? Serena Kern-Libera on changing age-related medical treatment.
Visit her LinkedIn profile and Technology Networks profile. Listen to her on Spotify and follow her music on YouTube.