My name is Jan Karlseder. I'm a professor here in the Molecular and Cell Biology Laboratory, and I'm the Director of the Glenn Center for Research on the Biology of Aging.

I grew up in Austria. I grew up in the west of Austria, in the mountains, in a very small village actually. And I went to University in Innsbruck, and then I switched to the University of Vienna to study molecular biology there because that branch didn't exist in Innsbruck.

We had certainly a very nice childhood because we could just go behind the house into the forest and play. But at the same time you feel very quickly that it's a fairly small minded place. I enjoy going back now because it's a beautiful area of Austria, but it hasn't changed in the last 50 years at all. Still the same people looking through the same window in the same house, that makes me very happy that I'm not there anymore.

We skied a lot. We grew up in the middle of skiing country in Austria. We took our skis to school, and then when school ended at one or so in the afternoon, we took the gondola and went skiing. That was absolutely fantastic. That's how our winters were like.

It's difficult. My childhood is a little bit split because I had an elder brother who died and before and after was a little bit different.

So I mean, yeah, we grew up playing in the forest and going to school and doing whatever what all normal kids do. And then that happened and my parents had kids again after that.

So it changed a lot for me because I migrated from being a younger brother to being a very old sibling to two very young ones.

My grandfather actually was a professor at the University of Vienna in botany. He took us out a lot just walking and hiking and explaining every plant and every insect and every mushroom. My dad is an engineer, so he actually wanted me to go into a technical direction. I tried that very briefly and the math was overwhelming and I escaped into science.

But I really don't recall this conscious decision of saying I want to be a molecular biologist, I need to study cancer because this is important to me or something like that. It really just happened from an interest in biology and then a decision of doing something that actually can get you a job.

When I got my PhD in Vienna, and then I moved to New York City to do a postdoc, which I did at Rockefeller University.

After that, I looked for faculty positions both in Europe and in the US. I walked into the courtyard and was captivated. In that sense, It really wasn't very conscious. again, I just perceived this place as beautiful and creative and a sign.

I am interested in what turns a normal healthy cell into a cancer cell.

I'm interested in cancer initiation as a function of age. We work with what is called the telomeres, which are the ends of the chromosomes, and they play a major role in aging and cancer biology.

What my lab does is trying to understand all the different molecular pathways that are triggered by this telomere shortening process. And that ranges from simply stop of the cell cycle, to activation of inflammation, to changes in mitochondrial metabolism, genome instability.

We are trying to understand how all these seemingly independent pathways are connected through the process of telomere shortening and signaling from short telomeres. The next steps are going to be to really walk away from this idea that molecular pathways work independently of each other, and that can lead to breakthroughs that lead to therapies.