Impact
Nazif Alic leads a laboratory at UCL's Institute of Healthy Ageing that uses the fruit fly to study how transcriptional regulation shapes adult physiology, metabolism and lifespan, with a particular interest in gene regulation by all three eukaryotic nuclear RNA polymerases. His group reported in Nature (2017) that RNA polymerase III limits longevity downstream of TORC1, linking a core nutrient-sensing pathway to a specific transcriptional machinery. Later work showed that transient activation of the FOXO transcription factor dFOXO in youth leaves a transcriptional memory, via chromatin remodelling and Xbp1, that reduces later-life mortality (Nature Aging, 2022), and that disrupting tRNA biogenesis or removing the Pol III repressor Maf1 in neurons can improve later-life health and extend lifespan (PLoS Biology, 2025). He trained at the University of New South Wales and came to UCL as an EMBO/Marie Curie fellow with Linda Partridge before starting his own laboratory in 2013; he has been Professor at UCL since October 2023.
Metrics
- h-index 30 · google scholar as of 2026-09-23 source ↗
Research output
73 works · 3,363 citations · h-index 29 OpenAlex ↗
Selected publications
- Cells have distinct mechanisms to maintain protection against different reactive oxygen species: Oxidative-stress-response genes ↗ 2004 · 462 citations
- Ageing in Drosophila: The role of the insulin/Igf and TOR signalling network ↗ 2010 · 333 citations
- The Ras-Erk-ETS-Signaling Pathway Is a Drug Target for Longevity ↗ 2015 · 243 citations
- Reduction of DILP2 in Drosophila Triages a Metabolic Phenotype from Lifespan Revealing Redundancy and Compensation among DILPs ↗ 2008 · 201 citations
- A subcomplex of RNA polymerase III subunits involved in transcription termination and reinitiation ↗ 2005 · 144 citations