David Gems

David Gems is Professor of Biogerontology at the UCL Institute of Healthy Ageing, of which he is a co-founder and Research Director. He has a BSc in Biochemistry from the University of Sussex, and a PhD in Genetics from the University of Glasgow. He was a postdoc at Imperial College and the University of Missouri-Columbia, USA, before founding his own research group at UCL in 1997 as a Royal Society University Research Fellow. The aims of his research are to understand the causes of ageing, and to identify general principles of pathophysiology for late-life diseases.

Much of his work uses the nematode worm C. elegans, but he has also contributed to studies of ageing in other nematodes, Drosophila and the mouse, and has written on ageing and ethics. Ageing is now the main cause of serious illness worldwide, yet its underlying biology remains poorly understood. Understanding ageing is key to treating late-life disease. His upcoming book, On Aging (January 2027), describes how the field of ageing research is beginning at last to achieve such an understanding.