Administrative and Program Enrichment Core

This Core’s primary goals are to promote aging research by offering seminars, meetings, and conferences that focus on the basic biology of aging and to administer research cores and programs that are regional and national resources for investigators who study aging.

The statistical component of the administration core is led by Dr. Jonathan Gelfond and has contributed to multi-institutional collaborations and has projected its capability to the aging research community through analytical tools. The efforts include an in-depth analysis of rapamycin that was recently translated as a human clinical trial (Kraig, et. al. 2019). The Core has a history of innovation in statistical analysis for longevity research, Dr. Gelfond worked with Dr. Catherine Cheng to conduct a novel analysis of the sex differences in mortality and response to anti-aging interventions (Cheng, et al., 2019). This effort bridged multiple institutions and leveraged the data collected by the Interventions Testing Program at Jackson Labs, University of Michigan and UT Health San Antonio. It was shown that male mice had higher early risk of death that diminished with age, and that early male mortality was affected by weight, whereas female mortality was more resilient to weight’s effects. Dr. Gelfond also created an R package that provides rigor and reproducibility (Gelfond, et. al., 2018) that is used within the core for statistical analysis.