Impact
Björn Schumacher has been Full Professor and Director of the Institute for Genome Stability in Ageing and Disease at the University of Cologne's CECAD Cluster of Excellence for Aging Research since 2013. His research treats DNA damage as a causal driver of ageing and asks how organisms maintain health as genome damage accumulates. Using C. elegans, his group showed how longevity assurance mechanisms respond to DNA damage and can maintain tissue function despite persistent lesions, suggesting two complementary strategies against ageing: DNA repair and raising tolerance to unrepaired damage. He pioneered the concept of non-cell-autonomous, systemic DNA damage responses, in which DNA damage in germ cells triggers elevated stress resistance and tissue maintenance in the soma. His team identified the DREAM complex as a master repressor of somatic DNA repair capacity; inhibiting DREAM induces repair genes across pathways and confers strong resistance to DNA damage, a mechanism conserved from nematodes to humans. He is President of the German Society for DNA Repair, co-directs the Minerva Center on healthy ageing at Bar-Ilan University, served as President of the German Society for Aging Research (2014–2020) and holds ERC and DFG Reinhart Koselleck funding.
Metrics
- h-index 51 · google scholar as of 2026-09-23 source ↗