Dario Valenzano

Impact

Dario Riccardo Valenzano is an evolutionary biologist who has been Scientific Director of the Leibniz Institute on Aging - Fritz Lipmann Institute (FLI) in Jena since January 2024, where he also leads a research group and holds a professorship at Friedrich Schiller University Jena. His group studies how evolution shapes life-history traits across species and applies an evolutionary and ecological perspective to host-microbiome interactions in health, disease and aging, combining statistical modelling, genomics, experimental biology and fieldwork. He is closely associated with the turquoise killifish (Nothobranchius furzeri), a vertebrate that lives only a few months, as an experimental model for aging; FLI describes him as a pioneer of killifish research. Using this model, his lab reports that young-derived microbiomes can restore youthful functions in older fish and, in a 2026 Nature Aging study, mapped conserved features of immune aging including chronic inflammation, DNA damage in progenitor cells and remodelling of the hematopoietic organ. Current work examines how declining immune surveillance lets the gut microbiome shift with age. For longevity readers he links evolutionary theory of aging with a fast vertebrate model for testing interventions, especially microbiome-based ones.

Metrics

• h-index 33 · google scholar as of 2026-09-23 source ↗

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