João Pedro de Magalhães

Impact

João Pedro de Magalhães uses genomics and bioinformatics to study the ageing process and how it might be manipulated to prevent age-related disease. After a PhD at the University of Namur and a postdoctoral post with George Church at Harvard Medical School, he established a group on genomic approaches to ageing at the University of Liverpool in 2008 and moved to the University of Birmingham in 2022 as Chair of Molecular Biogerontology, where he leads the Genomics of Ageing and Rejuvenation Lab. His group maintains the Human Ageing Genomic Resources (HAGR), a set of openly available databases on ageing genetics and species longevity (including GenAge and AnAge) that have been described in successive Nucleic Acids Research database papers from 2012 to 2024. His lab has also worked on gene networks of ageing and on sequencing and analysing genomes of long-lived species, including the bowhead whale (Cell Reports, 2015). He has given three TEDx talks, and his research has been covered by the BBC, CNN and the Financial Times. He communicates about ageing research through the lab's @AgingBiology X account and a personal website of essays.

Metrics

• h-index 82 · google scholar as of 2026-09-23 source ↗
• 20,536 followers on X as of 2026-09-23 source ↗
• 1,723 on facebook as of 2026-09-23 source ↗

Research output

301 works · 19,536 citations · h-index 76 OpenAlex ↗

Selected publications

• RNA-Seq Signatures Normalized by mRNA Abundance Allow Absolute Deconvolution of Human Immune Cell Types ↗ 2019 · 1,084 citations
• Gene co-expression analysis for functional classification and gene–disease predictions ↗ 2016 · 1,083 citations
• Human Ageing Genomic Resources: new and updated databases ↗ 2017 · 812 citations
• Meta-analysis of age-related gene expression profiles identifies common signatures of aging ↗ 2009 · 779 citations
• A database of vertebrate longevity records and their relation to other life‐history traits ↗ 2009 · 627 citations

Links

Research fields

Associated labs