As we celebrate International Day of Women and Girls in Science, here are just a few of the names to be found in our articles.

Longevity.Technology: In 2015, The UN declared 11 February “International Day of Women and Girls in Science” and today marks the sixth celebration of the vital role women and girls play in science, technology and innovation. The purpose of the day is to achieve full and equal access to and participation in science for women and girls, and we are delighted to showcase some of the women whose work we have covered or will be covering and to play our part in promoting women and girls in science.

With a PhD from Harvard under her belt, Dr Daisy Robinton (pictured) currently works at Cambrian Biopharma, developing a new company around women’s health.

Robinton joined Cambrian as Scientist in Residence to move women’s health forward. She says: “There’s been a long history of neglect and bias against females in biomedical research, and in clinical trial design, and in the way that we teach medicine and perform healthcare in this country, even how we diagnose patients. There’s a growing groundswell around the fact that women have not been included in how we understand, diagnose and treat disease, or in how we understand basic principles of biology.”

Dr Juliette Han holds a PhD in Neuroscience from Harvard University and is Chief Operating Officer.

“We’re figuring out a way to make the drug discovery process more thoughtfully and flexibly resourced and programmatic, to increase its overall chance of success,” she says of Cambrian‘s mission. “Our sweet spot is finding scientists with promising druggable targets that align with our mandate, and we provide the drug discovery and operational expertise.”
Following Cambrian’s $60 million exit from stealth, we’ll be finding out more about their key players next week.

Eleanor Sheekey is a PhD student and content producer for the smash-hit YouTube channel The Sheekey Science Show. The channel covers topics from aging and longevity, gut microbiome, neuroscience, CRISPR, biotech companies and book reviews. Eleanor’s role in explaining and popularising some tricky scientific concepts can not be overstated. We’ll be interviewing Eleanor next week, finding out how The Sheekey Science show came to be and announcing some rather exciting news!

Dr Nabiha Saklayen is CEO & Co-Founder of Cellino, a Massachusetts-based biotech that announced the closing of a $16m seed round recently. “This seed financing round enables us to build towards a democratized future for autologous cells and tissues,” Dr Saklayen said. “I’m thrilled to be leading a team that brings together diverse backgrounds spanning laser physics, stem cell biology, and machine learning, to achieve our shared mission to increase patient access to custom regenerative therapies.” Stay tuned for an interview with Dr Saklayen coming to Longevity.Technology soon.

Dr Evelyne Bischof is a medical doctor and Associate Professor at the Shanghai University of Medicine and Health Sciences; she worked in collaboration with Deep Longevity’s Alex Zhavoronkov, Alexey Moskalev and others on the creation of longevity medicine course for physicians. Speaking about the new course, Dr Bischof told Longevity.Technology: “I hope that my clinical colleagues will also see the potential in longevity and develop a passion for it. I would love them to understand that longevity medicine is not anti-aging, it’s not about prolonging life – it’s really about prolonging healthy lifespan, and knowing what tools we as physicians can use to really know a patient individually.”

Daragh Campbell joined Longevity.Technology as our Scientific Editor in November. Daragh holds a BSc in Genetics and an MSc in Medical Genetics from the University of Glasgow, and spent two years working as a Research Assistant in an industrial setting, focusing on the development of CAR-T immunotherapies. Daragh has a keen interest in scientific advances in the prevention of disease and longevity and can often be found conducting experiments on herself to assess new and different methods, some of which feature as Longevity.Technology reviews. She is currently researching Longevity.Technology’s first report on the supplements industry (available for pre-order now!).

Tyra Kozlow, a 22-year-old product design graduate from the University of Huddersfield, made longevity headlines when she defeated thousands of entries from around the world to become a finalist at 2020 Global Grad Show with her design for a discreet earring that monitors blood sugar levels and delivers feedback in real-time. An innovative CGM wearable, the Sense Glucose Earring should help sufferers form good management habits early, reducing the impact of diabetes on the body’s organs and increasing both lifespan and healthspan.

Professor Annalena Venneri is Professor of Clinical Neuropathy at the University of Sheffield. Her recent study, published in The Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease Reports, highlights the impact of being overweight in mid-life could have on brain health in older age. “More than 50 million people are thought to be living with Alzheimer’s disease and despite decades of ground breaking studies and a huge global research effort we still don’t have a cure for this cruel disease,” said Professor Venneri. “Prevention plays such an important role in the fight against the disease.”

Dr Larisa Andreeva is Mitocholine’s co-founder and CEO; clinical trials are planned for the Mitocholine, which targets the “brain energy gap” to counteract development of metabolic syndrome and impede the onset of dementia.

“We believe that Mitocholine as a nutritional fortification will revolutionise and extend human cognitive health similar to the way fluoridation of water revolutionised dental health,” Dr Andreeva told Longevity.Technology.

Polina Mamoshina, DPhil, is Chief Scientific Officer of Deep Longevity, a company spearheading the development of aging clocks; these are key in both personalised and precision medicine. “At Deep Longevity we are working on a really broad portfolio of aging clocks, ranging from simple blood test based to sophisticated omics like Deep Methylation clocks or DeepMAge,” Dr Mamoshina told Longevity.Technology.

Spun-out from Harvard Med’s Department of Genetics, 64x Bio emerged from stealth recently to announce its proprietary platform VectorSelect. We have an interview with co-founder and CEO Dr Alex Rovner coming soon.

Dr Ann Beliën left Johnson & Johnson to start Rejuvenate Biomed – a company founded on the principle of creating synergistic combination products that target aging. With a platform for identifying combinations of existing drugs that target multiple pathways of aging, this biomedical start-up is already gearing up for human trials of its lead compound.

Our newest writer, Victoria Barros-Metlova, a DPhil candidate in Inorganic Chemistry working on biocatalysis of drug fragments with P450 monooxygenase mutants under the supervision of Professor Luet Wong, at Oxford. She researches and writes about longevity (when her dogs allow her the time!) and her article on a link between metal, pollution and neurodegeneration that could aid Alzheimer’s research will be published tomorrow.
Many more women of longevity were featured on International Women’s Day.