Date: 17 December 2025 (Wednesday)
Time: 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Venue: Seminar Room 3, G/F, The HKJC Bldg for Interdisciplinary Research, 5 Sassoon Road
Host: Professor Jiandong Huang

Dr. Yifan Yang recently established his own laboratory focused on aging from a systems biology perspective at Westlake University in Hangzhou, China. He previously completed his postdoctoral training research at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel under the mentorship of Uri Alon. He obtained his B.S. from Peking University, Yuanpei College; and his Ph.D. from University of Paris (Paris V).

A century of work has catalogued myriad molecules, pathways, and physiological states that modulate aging, yet an integrative quantitative theory of why organisms age is still missing. We argue that the way forward is to coarse grain biological complexity into a small set of universal, predictive, and interpretable variables. We have now realized this crucial step. Longitudinal measurements in mice and single E. coli cells reveal that the dynamics of physiological damage in both organisms obey the same low dimensional stochastic differential equation. This model—with no retraining—accurately forecasts human survival curves, age related disease incidence, and the effects of interventions such as parabiosis. Going forward, the resulting framework provides a unified mathematical lens through which decades of aging research can be systematically integrated and reevaluated. As an example, I will show how it uncovers a surprising quantitative link between health-span and lifespan inequality and how that insight guides the search for interventions that not only lengthen life but also compress morbidity, a central goal of longevity research.