Dr. Tamir Chandra
Tamir Chandra, Ph.D. is Chancellor’s Fellow and Tenured Principal Investigator at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Human Genetics Unit, The University of Edinburgh.
MRC Human Genetics Unit is one of the largest MRC research establishments, housing over two hundred scientists, support staff, research fellows, Ph.D. students, and visiting workers.
Tamir’s vision is to impact the lives of people suffering from age-related disabilities and to increase the health-span in old age. He is trying to achieve this by understanding the underlying mechanisms of aging, which will hopefully allow us to design interventions for epigenetic rejuvenation and slowing down the degenerative process associated with aging.
Tamir studies mechanisms of aging in a variety of cellular contexts, including cells isolated from older individuals (and even centenarians) and children suffering from premature aging syndromes. As humans age, we accumulate increasing numbers of stressed cells, called senescent cells, within our organs. These cells stop dividing and no longer perform their original function; as their number increases, the ability of an organ system to do its job may decrease.
Cells from healthy young individuals stop dividing after a certain number of cell divisions in culture (replicative senescence) or after exposing the cells to certain cellular stresses (oncogenic stimulus and stress-induced senescence).
The recent discovery, that a change to a single gene can increase the lifespan in a variety of animals, seems to suggest that aging may be partly predefined by a program written into our DNA.
Read Global reorganization of the nuclear landscape in senescent cells.
Recently a mouse model with severe aging features, such as muscle loss and cataracts was “cured” through the selective killing of senescent cells, suggesting that senescence is one of several cellular aging mechanisms that contribute to the effects of aging.
Read Body’s ageing process accelerated by DNA changes, study suggests and Functional heterogeneity in senescence. As well, read Tamir’s highly cited article Experimental design for single-cell RNA sequencing.
Aside from work at MRC, Tamir also lectures and provides training on Online Courses, Conferences, and Symposiums. See the Undoing Aging Conference and The Aging Cell Conference.
Tamir earned his Ph.D. in Oncology and Cancer Biology from Cancer Research UK at the University of Cambridge in 2011. He earned his Bachelor’s Degree of Science in Biochemistry from The Goethe University Frankfurt in 2007. Before finishing his Bachelor’s Degree, Tamir worked as a Visiting Researcher in the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, in New Delhi.
In 2007, just prior to starting his Ph.D., he was a Visiting Researcher at the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
Tamir did his Postdoctoral Research between 2012 and 2016 at The Babraham Institute, where he began with research in understanding cellular aging. As well, he was a Postdoctoral Scientist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute where he was Answering age-old questions, among others What is cellular senescence?.
He finished with his Postdoc in 2016, before becoming a Chancellor’s Fellow and tenure track Group Leader at MRC Human Genetics Unit.
Read Notch Signaling Mediates Secondary Senescence and Polymer Modeling Predicts Chromosome Reorganization in Senescence.
See Tamir Chandra on studying secondary senescence with single cell genomics.
Visit his LinkedIn profile and his University profile. Follow him on Publons, ResearchGate, Semantic Scholar, Google Scholar, and Twitter.
