Integration Initiative: Sex, Aging, Genomics, and Evolution (IISAGE) jobs and careers

About Integration Initiative: Sex, Aging, Genomics, and Evolution (IISAGE)

The Integration Initiative: Sex, Aging, Genomics and Evolution (IISAGE) is an established Biology Integration Institute (BII) set to determine how genome architecture, organismal biology, and phenotypic plasticity contribute to sex-specific aging and its evolution. In many species across the animal kingdom, one sex ages faster or has a longer lifespan. This sex specific aging has significant implications for conservation, agriculture, and human health. However, no unified model exists that reveals how mechanistic and evolutionary processes cause the diverse patterns of sex-specific aging seen in nature. Furthermore, current research on sex-specific aging has been siloed because researchers primarily use discipline-specific approaches without integration. IISAGE brings together expertise from evolutionary biology, molecular genetics, genomics, physiology, and computational biology to identify the molecular mechanisms generating sex differences in aging. Working with amniotes, fish, and insects, IISAGE will define the rules that govern sex-specific aging. Tightly integrated projects with common methodologies will test hypotheses focused on differences between the sexes in genome architecture, organismal biology, and phenotypic plasticity to understand sex-specific aging. Through an integrated, iterative process of data collection, modeling, and hypothesis testing, IISAGE will define how processes at the molecular, organismal, and population level interact to generate sex-specific aging and develop predictive models for how sex differences in aging arise.