Impact
Eric Verdin is a Belgian-born physician-scientist who is President and Chief Executive Officer of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Novato, California, and a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Trained in medicine at the University of Liège and at Harvard Medical School, he held positions at the University of Brussels, the NIH and the Picower Institute before joining the Buck. His laboratory was the first to clone a family of histone deacetylases (HDACs), and studies how metabolism, diet and small molecules regulate HDACs and sirtuins and thereby aging and age-related diseases including Alzheimer's disease. Current work focuses on immune aging and chronic inflammation, including how metabolites such as NAD+, acetyl-CoA and the ketone body beta-hydroxybutyrate change with obesity, calorie restriction, fasting and ketogenic diets and shape immune responses, and how HIV infection drives inflammation and accelerated aging. Recent 2026 papers link trained immunity in hematopoietic stem cells to age-associated inflammation. He founded Acylin (acquired by AbbVie) and has advised companies including Calico and Sirtris. For longevity readers he is both a leading researcher on metabolism and epigenetic regulation in aging and head of a major independent aging research institute.
Metrics
- h-index 144 · google scholar as of 2026-09-23 source ↗
Research funding
34 NIH awards · USD 26M total NIH RePORTER ↗
- Reversible Mitochondrial Protein Acetylation and Metabolic Regulation National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases · 2017 · USD 2M
- Reversible Mitochondrial Protein Acetylation and Metabolic Regulation National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases · 2018 · USD 2M
- Reversible Mitochondrial Protein Acetylation and Metabolic Regulation National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases · 2019 · USD 2M
- Molecular Mechanisms of HIV Latency National Institute on Drug Abuse · 2017 · USD 1M
- Molecular Mechanisms of HIV Latency National Institute on Drug Abuse · 2019 · USD 1M