Dan is an Associate Professor of Epidemiology at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public and the Butler Columbia Aging Center, where he directs the Center’s Geroscience Computational Core. He was an Early-Career Fellow of the Jacobs Foundation and is a current Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Child Brain Development Network. He was an investigator of the PROMENTA Center at the University of Oslo, Norway and is a Senior Researcher in the SocioMed Research Nucleus at Universidad Mayor in Santiago, Chile. He is a Scientific Advisory Board Member for the Xprize for Healthspan Extension. Prior to coming to Columbia, Dan was Assistant Professor in the Departments of Medicine and Population Health Sciences at the Duke University School of Medicine, where he previously completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development, with Terrie Moffit and Avshalom Caspi. Dan earned his BA from Swarthmore College and his PhD from the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health.

Dan works at the intersection of the social and behavioral sciences, genomics, and public health. His focus for the past several years has been on development and evaluation of methods to quantify the pace and progress of biological process of aging in young, mid-life, and older-adult humans and the application of these methods to study (1) how life-history and social factors contribute to individual differences in healthy aging; and (2) whether and how aging processes can be modified by intervention. With collaborators Terrie Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi he originated the Pace of Aging method to quantify the aging process from longitudinal analysis of human physiology and recently translated this method into a DNA-methylation blood test that can be implemented from a single time point of data collection. He is principal investigator of NIH-funded projects to test how caloric restriction may slow or reverse aging-related changes to the genome (CALERIE), to understand long-term impacts of in-utero famine exposure on biological aging (Dutch Hunger Winter Family Study, with Bertie Lumey), and to test the potential of anti-poverty policy intervention to slow biological aging (MyGoals for Healthy Aging, with Peter Muennig).

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