Jan Vijg, Ph.D.

Dr. Vijg is professor and chair, department of genetics, as well as the Lola and Saul Kramer Chair in Molecular Genetics, at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He moved from Europe to the USA in 1993 and held professorial positions at Harvard and University of Texas, San Antonio, as well as the Buck Institute for Age Research. His areas of expertise include molecular genetics, gerontology, cancer, and aging.

More specifically, Dr. Vijg is interested in damage, including oxidative damage, to the genome, genome instability, and its role in the etiology of aging and age related disease. He was the first to develop transgenic mouse models (MutaMouse™) for studying mutagenesis in vivo. Dr. Vijg also demonstrated that the frequency of mutations increases with age in most tissues. He has been involved with biotech companies since 1990, having founded and directed Ingeny B.V. from 1990-1993.

Dr, Vijg’s many awards include the N. Shock New Investigator Award (The Gerontological Society of America, 1994) and the Ellison Medical Foundation Senior Scholar Award. He has co-authored several books, including “Aging of the Genome, 2007,” more than 200 peer-reviewed papers, and holds eight patents. Dr. Vijg earned his Ph.D., as well as master’s and bachelor’s degrees from the University of Leiden, The Netherlands.