Impact
Daniel Promislow is an evolutionary geneticist who has worked for more than 30 years on the biology of ageing, drawing on quantitative genetics, biodemography and comparative, systems and theoretical biology. His work asks whether ageing pathways identified in inbred laboratory organisms explain the variation in rates of ageing seen in genetically diverse natural populations, including humans. He has used metabolomics to link genes with rates of ageing, first in fruit flies and then in mice, marmosets, humans and companion dogs; his fly research concerns molecular biomarkers of ageing and interactions between social behaviour and ageing. He is Principal Investigator of the NIH-funded Dog Aging Project, a long-term longitudinal study of the biological and environmental determinants of healthy ageing in companion dogs that has enrolled more than 50,000 dogs and includes a clinical trial of rapamycin for healthspan in dogs. After faculty posts at the University of Georgia and the University of Washington (2013–2024), he moved in 2024 to the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University. He is a Fellow of the AAAS, the Gerontological Society of America and the American Aging Association.
Metrics
- h-index 71 · google scholar as of 2026-09-23 source ↗
Research output
368 works · 14,607 citations · h-index 63 OpenAlex ↗
Selected publications
- Living fast and dying young: A comparative analysis of life‐history variation among mammals ↗ 1990 · 1,227 citations
- Network thinking in ecology and evolution ↗ 2005 · 968 citations
- Mortality in North American Dogs from 1984 to 2004: An Investigation into Age-, Size-, and Breed-Related Causes of Death ↗ 2011 · 418 citations
- Costs of sexual selection in natural populations of mammals ↗ 1992 · 351 citations
- SENESCENCE IN NATURAL POPULATIONS OF MAMMALS: A COMPARATIVE STUDY ↗ 1991 · 331 citations
Research funding
4 NIH awards · USD 2M total NIH RePORTER ↗
- Metabolomics clocks as a tool to explore mechanisms of aging National Institute on Aging · 2026 · USD 634K
- Metabolomics clocks as a tool to explore mechanisms of aging National Institute on Aging · 2025 · USD 627K
- Metabolomics clocks as a tool to explore mechanisms of aging National Institute on Aging · 2024 · USD 593K
- A systems biology approach to explain sex differences in aging National Institute on Aging · 2023 · USD 174K