Impact
Rochelle Buffenstein is a comparative biologist of aging best known for her research on the naked mole-rat, a rodent with an unusually long lifespan for its size and marked resistance to age-related diseases. Her work covers comparative and evolutionary biology of aging, long-lived models of attenuated aging, inflammaging, proteostasis, and cardiac and metabolic aging, asking what molecular mechanisms allow some mammals to maintain healthspan and resist cancer, neurodegeneration and heart disease. She has helped establish the naked mole-rat as a model organism in biomedical research, maintains a large captive colony and has supplied animals to laboratories worldwide. She is a visiting research professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Illinois Chicago; her 2024 publications listed Calico Life Sciences alongside UIC. Recent work from her group includes studies of the naked mole-rat's unusual immune system, its microbiome in relation to healthy aging and social structure (Cell Reports, 2026), and an autochthonous lung cancer model identifying requirements for cellular transformation in the species (Cancer Discovery, 2026). This work gives longevity research a naturally long-lived mammalian model for studying resistance to aging.
Metrics
- h-index 69 · google scholar as of 2026-09-23 source ↗
Research output
246 works · 13,868 citations · h-index 62 OpenAlex ↗
Selected publications
- Life and Death: Metabolic Rate, Membrane Composition, and Life Span of Animals ↗ 2007 · 931 citations
- Genome sequencing reveals insights into physiology and longevity of the naked mole rat ↗ 2011 · 621 citations
- Negligible senescence in the longest living rodent, the naked mole-rat: insights from a successfully aging species ↗ 2008 · 504 citations
- The Naked Mole-Rat: A New Long-Living Model for Human Aging Research ↗ 2005 · 477 citations
- Protein stability and resistance to oxidative stress are determinants of longevity in the longest-living rodent, the naked mole-rat ↗ 2009 · 428 citations
Links
Research fields
Sources & review · profile last updated 2026-09-29
- https://bios.uic.edu/profiles/buffenstein-rochelle/ 2026-09-23
- https://academyofgeroscience.org/rochelle-buffenstein-phd 2026-09-23
- https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ycDY0VQAAAAJ&hl=en 2026-09-23
- https://doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2026.117265 2026-09-23
- https://doi.org/10.1158/2159-8290.cd-25-0526 2026-09-23
- https://doi.org/10.1007/s11357-024-01420-9 2026-09-23