Joris Deelen

Joris Deelen obtained his PhD at the Leiden University Medical Center in The Netherlands in 2014 in the group of Prof. Dr. Eline Slagboom. In 2016, he joined the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing in Germany as a postdoctoral researcher in the group of Prof. Dr. Linda Partridge, where he was promoted to independent Research Group Leader in 2020. The work in his group is mainly focussed on the identification and functional characterisation of genetic variants linked to human longevity. To this end, they make use of the CRISPR/Cas9 system to generate transgenic cell lines and model organisms harbouring the identified variants and subsequently measure their functional effects in vitro and in vivo. This work is supported by both an ERC Starting Grant and a Longevity Impetus Grant. Moreover, his group focusses on the establishment of novel human aging studies in Cologne to determine the efficacy of previously identified biomarkers of aging in clinical studies. The main focus is on biomarkers that have been identified in large-scale international collaborations of human studies using omics-based approaches, such as metabolomics.