Speaker: Hongjie Li, Baylor College of Medicine assistant professor and CPRIT Scholar

Title: "Time flies, how? Unlocking the secrets of aging"

Abstract: Aging phenotypes have been observed and described for centuries and a number of different aging hypotheses have been proposed. However, several critical questions remain largely unaddressed in complex organisms. For example, do different cell types age at different rates? If yes, which cell types age the fastest across the whole body? Here I will present our recent work on the Aging Fly Cell Atlas, the first single-nucleus transcriptomic map of the whole aging organism. We characterize 163 distinct cell types and perform an in-depth analysis of changes in tissue cell composition, gene expression, and cell identities. This study provides a fresh insight in organism-level aging rate at cellular resolution.

Host: Ping Kang, adjunct assistant professor in genetics, development and cell biology

Biography: Hongjie Li obtained his Ph.D. degree from the University of Rochester under the mentorship of Dr. Henri Jasper and got his postdoctoral training with Dr. Liqun Luo at Stanford University.

Li started his lab in 2021 at Baylor College of Medicine (BCM). He is an assistant professor and CPRIT Scholar in Huffington Center on Aging and the Department of Molecular and Human Genetics. He pioneered the use of single-cell and single-nucleus RNA sequencing in Drosophila (2017 Cell; 2021a eLife), and has been leading the Fly Cell Atlas project (2022 Science). His lab recently established the Aging Fly Cell Atlas for studying whole organism aging at cellular resolution (2023 Science). His current research focuses on applying single-cell sequencing technologies to understand whole-organism aging and inter-tissue communication during aging. 

His achievements have been recognized by receiving several awards, including the Stanford Neuroscience Institute Interdisciplinary Award, NIH K99/R00 Award, Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) Award, Ted Nash Long Life Foundation Award, and NIH Director’s New Innovator Award DP2.