💬 Biography
Prof dr. Eline Slagboom is a biologist, ageing researcher, and Professor of Molecular Epidemiology, heading both the Molecular Epidemiology section and the Department of Biomedical Data Sciences. For a decade she chaired the LUMC theme Lifecourse Epidemiology and Geroscience (LEGend) and the Dutch Society for Research on Ageing. She is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing in Cologne, and a Medical Delta Professor at Delft University of Technology. She co-founded the biobanking consortia BBMRI-NL and the Netherlands Cohort Consortium (NCC), established the Leiden Longevity Study cohort, and steered national metabolomics research within BBMRI.
Her research focuses on the molecular and genetic foundations of human ageing, the development of biomarkers for biological age and frailty, early recognition of vulnerability in middle age and the study of immune-metabolic responses to lifestyle interventions in older adults, using multi-omics approaches with a strong data science component.
Slagboom studied biology in Leiden and obtained her PhD in 1993 on Genomic instability and aging. She became Professor of Molecular Epidemiology at Leiden University Medical Center in 2000. She has led several large national and international consortia, including the EU FP7 project IDEAL and currently VOILA, the largest public–private ageing initiative in the Netherlands.
She is committed to education and created training programs to stimulate creative and logical scientific thinking in secondary school students and teachers, as well as for students in the LUMC Master Vitality and Ageing. Her distinctions include the Designers and Artists 4 Genomics Award (2011), membership of the KNAW, a Fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing, and the Schober Award (2021).
🎤 Presentation: The Molecular Epidemiology of Human Ageing
Molecular Epidemiology, Biomedical Data Sciences Leiden University Medical Center (The Netherlands); Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing (Germany)
In human ageing research we study molecular profiles to generate novel metrics indicating the ageing rate and physiological or mental vulnerability and decline. Moreover, we search for genes influencing age-related diseases and longevity to understand causal mechanisms of ageing, with very interesting novel findings on protective gene variants.
Molecular profiles in blood or tissues represent organ health. To construct biomarker scores representing overall health and identify causal pathways of vulnerability and resilience we focus  on the same molecular profiles in cohort and intervention studies across the globe. Thus increasing our ability to understand the (biological) heterogeneity in responses of older individuals to different environmental conditions and lifestyle/pharmacological interventions. Moreover, these studies demonstrated that much of the age-related physiological decline can still be acted upon in the second half of life, which opens the door for more personalised approaches to target ageing-related conditions in older individuals.