Anne Brunet is a 2023 NOMIS Awardee, the Michele and Timothy Barakett Professor of Genetics at Stanford Medicine and codirector of the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Aging at Stanford University (US). She is leading the Organ Synchronization in Aging and Suspended Animation project.

Born in France, Brunet obtained her BSc from the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and her PhD from the University of Nice. She did postdoctoral training with Michael Greenberg at Harvard Medical School in Boston, US. Brunet has published over 100 peer-reviewed papers and reviews. She has received several awards, including the Pfizer/AFAR Innovation in Aging Research Award and the Vincent Cristofalo Rising Star Award in Aging Research. She received a Pioneer Award and a Transformative Award from the NIH Director’s fund, which supports scientists who propose pioneering and transforming approaches to major challenges in biomedical research. In 2022, together with Andrew Dillin, Brunet received the Lurie Prize in Biomedical Sciences.

Brunet and her team are interested in the molecular mechanisms of aging and longevity. They have developed an original line of investigation to understand aging based on the integration of model organisms with diverse lifespans—worms, fish and mice. Using the Caenorhabditis elegans worm, the Brunet lab has identified pathways involved in delaying aging in response to external stimuli such as availability of nutrients and availability of the opposite sex. The Brunet lab made the exciting discoveries that lifespan extension can be regulated by chromatin modifiers and inherited in a transgenerational epigenetic manner. Her lab also uses mouse models to address complex questions about mammalian aging, notably mechanisms regulating neural stem cell aging. The Brunet lab has pioneered the naturally short-lived African killifish as a promising new model to identify principles underlying aging and suspended animation.