Steven Austad, PhD
Professor, Department of Cellular and Structural Biology

	Dr. Austad studied this opossum suffering from cataracts. It was the opossum that first sparked his interest in studying the aging process in wild animals.
	Steven Austad writes not only for the scientific community, but also for a general audience. John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 1999

Tel: 210-567-6011
Email: Austad@uthscsa.edu

Research Interests

"My niche is to learn about aging by looking at animals that are nontraditional. Instead of studying lab mice, I study mice from nature. I look at bats and birds and other creatures chosen not because there is a lot of biological science background about them but because of what they can teach us about aging." Dr. Austad has expanded the focus of aging research, which previously had examined a very small sample of the biosphere (yeast, roundworms, fruit flies and mice) to include animals in the wild that tend to live longer than conventional wisdom would predict. A mouse-size bird, for example, can live 20 years. But with a high body temperature and metabolic rate one would think they are short lived. Dr. Austad wonders what's going on in their cells to enable them to do this?"

Dr. Austad seeks an answer to the following question: are the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying separate evolutionary extensions of life similar among species, or are there many different ways for nature to produce exceptionally slow aging? He utilizes diverse tools such as genomic sequence from nontraditional species such as the marmoset, phylogenetic information, and high-throughput gene expression profiling techniques to search for genetic "signatures" that markedly differ between long- and short-lived organisms, as these are likely to be crucial components of the aging process.