Photo by Erin Ashford
SRF staff is composed of mission-driven individuals who work tirelessly toward our goal of ending age-related disease. Our staff size fluctuates during the year with the addition of SRF Educational Summer Scholars and Post–Baccalaureates, however our full-time employees are listed below.
Matthew was awarded his Master’s degree at Northwestern Medical in 1999 for his work studying behavioral neuroscience in aged rodents. In 2005, at Baylor College of Medicine he received a PhD in Biochemistry for his work on proteins that regulate human telomeres. Postdoctoral research includes work at UC Berkeley on muscle stem cells and aging. Since 2010, Dr. O’Connor has headed up the MitoSENS project at the research center in Mountain View, California. His research is focused on “allotopic expression” of mitochondrial genes where his team is engineering mitochondrial genes to be expressed from the nucleus and targeted to the mitochondia. Since 2012 Dr. O’Connor has had broad oversight over many areas of research at SRF. Matthew O’Connor is passionate about performing basic research to combat the diseases and disabilities of aging.
Dr. Tesfahun Admasu was awarded a master’s degree in Biochemistry from Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia, and a PhD in Biochemistry from the National University of Singapore. During his PhD studies (2014-18), he identified drug synergy and investigated the mechanism based on “multi-omics” technology. This work led to seminal contributions to our understanding of aging and lifespan extension which were published in Developmental Cell and Nature Scientific Data. Dr. Tesfahun joined the University of Gondar and launched a master’s degree program in Biochemistry where he teaches Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. At the SRF-RC, Dr. Tesfahun applies CRISPRa/CRSPRi and next generation sequencing based transcriptome profiling to investigate the mechanisms of SASP induced senescence and apoptosis resistance of senescent cells.
Amelia earned her Bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2018. Putting a lifelong love of science to work, she began at SRF as a summer intern in 2017 and is now a full time computational biochemist on the atherosclerosis project. Amelia loves her dog Bode, science jokes, and playing outside.
Dr. Amit Sharma was awarded a Master’s degree in Biomedical Sciences from Delhi University, India. He received his PhD in 2009 in Biotechnology from University of Pune for his work demonstrating microRNA regulation of cytokines invovled in allergic inflammation in mice models. Dr. Sharma’s postdoctoral research at the Buck Institute, Novato, California involved investigating novel molecular regulatory pathways in regards to genotoxic stress and cellular senescence in invertebrate and mammalian models.
Dr. Sharma has recently joined SENS Research Foundation as Group Lead in the Senescence Immunology Research Group (“ImmunoSENS”). His research focus involves studying how aging and senescence affects the immune system and his research group will also investigate strategies to harness the immune system in mitigating deleterious effects of senescent cells with translational focus.
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