Award Recipients
2026 Pilot Projects
Daniella Chusyd, Indiana University
Dr. Chusyd's project uses African savanna elephants to investigate how early-life adversity becomes biologically embedded across the lifespan. Her study will establish primary skin fibroblast cultures from orphaned and age-matched wild elephants in Zambia to experimentally test cellular stress-response pathways, including DNA damage, repair capacity, and apoptotic responses to genotoxic and oxidative stressors. This work will generate feasibility data and preliminary effect sizes to support a future R01 examining the mechanisms underlying biological resilience to social adversity, with broader implications for understanding conserved pathways associated with early-life social experience and aging and health in long-lived social mammals, including humans.
Haolin Zeng, University of Georgia - Athens
Aging is shaped by both an individual's own genes and by the genes of its social partners. In most animals these effects are difficult to tease apart, since social variation is typically driven by thousands of small-effect loci scattered across the genome. The red imported fire ant offers a unique opportunity: a single supergene converts colonies from having one queen to many, shaping both individual physiology and the colony's social environment. Dr. Zeng's project applies a genotype × social-environment factorial design to track how worker ants age, while measuring survival, locomotor decline, and antennal sensory function across age-matched cohorts. Results will help establish the fire ant as a genetically tractable model for the social determinants of aging.
Guang-Wei Zhang, Virginia Commonwealth University
Dr. Zhang’s pilot project will examine how aging changes social initiation, partner preferences, group organization, and resilience following the loss of a familiar group member in mice. Using an identity-stable, AI-assisted tracking platform developed in his laboratory, the team will quantify individual, pairwise, and group-level behavior in young adult, middle-aged, and aged mice of both sexes. The project will also measure anterior cingulate cortex activity during self-initiated social approach to determine how aging and social loss alter neural signals related to social motivation. This work will establish a new animal-model framework for studying social-network resilience and vulnerability during aging.
2025 Pilot Projects
Camille Testard, Harvard University
Do social bonds make us healthier—even in animals that don’t always live in groups? Social bonds improve health in humans and other highly social species, but do these benefits extend to animals that can also live alone? Yellow-bellied marmots, which can be group or solitary living, provide an exceptional test case. Leveraging six decades of data from the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, this project uses high-tech biologging collars to track marmots’ interactions, movement, and exposure to environmental stress. Linking these behaviors to markers of aging and inflammation will reveal whether sociality consistently, variably, or not at all improves health—offering insights into the evolutionary roots and the mechanisms that regulate social determinants of health.
Millie Rincón-Cortés, University of Texas - Dallas
Early Life Programming of Neuroimmune Aging: A Translational Model for Understanding Social Determinants of Health Across the Lifespan This project will establish whether early life scarcity-adversity accelerates age-related neuroinflammation and immune dysfunction, providing crucial mechanistic insights into how childhood adversity programs differential aging trajectories. By examining immune aging signatures, microglial activation, and behavioral phenotypes in both sexes across the lifespan, we aim to identify specific biological pathways linking early social adversity to premature aging. This research could lead to biomarker development for early detection and targeted interventions to prevent adversity-induced accelerated aging.
2023 Pilot Projects
Dr. Hernández-Pacheco studies the processes governing the evolution and maintenance of individual variability within populations. Her pilot study will quantify the effects of environmental instability on social gradients of health by investigating links between hurricane exposure and individual cognitive decline in a socially stratified nonhuman primate population.
Dr. Sweis is a physician-scientist psychiatrist who uses cross-species approaches to study the neuroeconomics of decision making. He is interested in quantifying how the physical limits of the brain give rise to biases when making complex choices—sometimes leading to outcomes that contradict one’s own best interests. His pilot project will use mouse models to measure how sensitivity to regret and the pursuit of social rewards change across the lifespan. His team will measure responses of the brain’s reward system in vivo in order to better understand how complex decision systems may interact when representing missed opportunities for social contact.
2022 Pilot Projects
Dr. Jenkins examines the physiological and behavioral mechanisms linking early life psychosocial stress (ELS) with cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. His pilot project will test whether ELS, specifically maternal separation, affects vascular aging in rats.
Dr. Sweis uses a neuroeconomics approach to quantify how the physical limits of the brain give rise to biases in making complex choices, including those counter to an animal’s own self-interest. His pilot project will use experimental mouse models for decision-making to investigate how sensitivity to regret changes across the life course and in response to social status.
Dr. Wig’s work shows that connections in the brain become more disorganized with age, and that these changes in the brain’s network predict aging-related decline. His pilot award will support the development of an experimental mouse model to study this process in mice over time. It will lay the foundation for cross-species comparative analysis to identify the causes and consequences of brain network decline during aging.
2021 Pilot Projects
Christi Gendron, University of Michigan
Dr. Gendron uses Drosophila to understand the underlying neurobiology of how social interactions promote healthy aging. To accomplish this task, her lab has developed new tools that enabling them to activate and/or inhibit neurons in freely moving animals; they can therefore design powerful experiments that create spontaneous social experiences in the absence of natural cues or that “treat” individuals by activating remedial neural circuits in response to specific social behaviors in order to provide life-long protection from their effects. These experiments will provide new insights into how social interactions and their underlying neural networks directly impact aging.
Dr. Zipple will study the role of social adversity in determining rates of biological aging in house mice living in outdoor field enclosures. House mice are the most common biomedical model study system, yet little is known about their social determinants of aging under ecologically relevant social conditions. Working with his postdoctoral advisor, Dr. Michael Sheehan, and his pilot award mentor, Dr. Jenny Tung, he will build an epigenetic clock that can reliably measure biological age in house mice living outside under natural social circumstances and apply this tool to understand the role of social adversity on individual aging trajectories.
Dr. Rosenbaum will use a long-term data set to investigate wild mountain gorillas, which do not appear to suffer fitness costs when they lose their mothers at a young age. Using these data she will determine what constitutes early adversity in one of humans’ closest living relatives; to establish whether their resiliency to maternal loss is generalizable to other sources of adversity; and to determine whether they suffer health consequences of early adversity. Answering these questions will establish groundwork for exploring the bio-social pathways through which early environments influence health and survival.
2020 Pilot Projects
Kristen Berendzen, UC San Francisco
Social isolation and loss of social attachments have been associated with increased risk of numerous age-related diseases, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and all-cause mortality. However, our understanding of the links between social attachment behavior and peripheral physiological health has been limited by the lack of genetic animal models displaying adult attachment behavior. Kristen Berendzen proposes to use the prairie vole, an animal that forms long term pair bonds, as a genetic model for examining the mechanistic link between social attachment and these diverse health outcomes. This work, under the mentorship of Dr. Alessandro Bartolomucci, will help to clarify the complex interaction between social behavior and cardiometabolic health and may result in new therapeutic avenues for age-related diseases.
Dr. Dettmer will examine the influences of differing social environments early in life on biomarkers of inflammation in adulthood in rhesus macaques, with a particular focus on a novel biomarker of chronic inflammation, soluble urokinase plasminogen activator receptor (suPAR). Dr. Dettmer will also investigate the role of chronic inflammation on adult health outcomes as a function of early social experiences.
In his lab, Dr. Sheehan will examine the effects of costly status signaling on healthy aging in the lab and field enclosures, using the major urinary protein pheromones of house mice as a model system