Ilia Droujinine, PhD, Scripps fellow and principal investigator in the Department of Molecular Medicine at Scripps Research, has received the Junior Faculty Award from the American Federation for Aging Research (AFAR) and the Glenn Foundation for Medical Research. AFAR and the Glenn Foundation grant these awards in an effort to better understand the biological mechanisms that govern human aging, with the objective of translating this research into interventions that will extend healthspan with lifespan.

The Junior Faculty Award grants $125,000 to pioneering junior investigators whose long-term research is focused on the biology of aging. These researchers are specifically uncovering the basic mechanisms of aging, rather than disease-oriented studies. As a result, the awards are granted to scientists who are studying a wide spectrum of biomedical and clinical topics that explore why and how we age – and Droujinine is no exception.

At Scripps Research, Droujinine’s research is focused on how different organs communicate with each other in the body. Emerging studies have shown the ways this communication becomes dysregulated with age, yet no one has broadly defined these complex, highly coordinated communications networks. Until now. Droujinine and his lab have developed a platform to illuminate the diverse sets of interorgan proteins that talk to each other during different biological and physiological processes – and how these are impacted by aging.   

Droujinine has received many awards and honors for his research in the field, most recently including the Herbert Tabor Young Investigator Award from the Journal of Biological Chemistry and the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, the HMS Innovation Grant Program Research Award from Harvard Medical School and the Alumni Gold Medal from the University of Waterloo.

Droujinine will attend the upcoming 2023 AFAR Grantee Conference among other recipients, mentors and leaders to discuss his research progress and findings to date.