Simon Melov

Impact

Simon Melov is a geroscientist at the Buck Institute, where he was the third faculty hire when the institute opened in 1999. His laboratory combines invertebrate and mouse models, human cells and tissues, and genomic and computational methods to study how cells and tissues change with age and with pharmacological intervention. With Gordon Lithgow he co-authored a 2000 Science paper reporting that superoxide dismutase/catalase mimetics extended lifespan in C. elegans. His group also reported that late-life rapamycin treatment reversed age-related heart dysfunction in mice (Aging Cell, 2013), and he co-authored the 2014 Nature commentary "Treat ageing" with Luigi Fontana, Brian Kennedy, Valter Longo and Douglas Seals, which argued for targeting ageing itself in medical research. Recent work includes 2026 Nature Aging papers on the diversity of senescent cells and on senescent microglia in the ageing mouse brain. He co-directs the Buck Institute's Mouse Phenotyping and Single-Cell Biology cores, was a founding editor of Aging Cell and founding chair of the Gordon Research Conference on Oxidative Stress and Disease, and has twice received the Glenn Award for Research in Biological Mechanisms of Aging.

Metrics

• h-index 76 · google scholar as of 2026-09-23 source ↗

Research output

616 works · 23,269 citations · h-index 71 OpenAlex ↗

Selected publications

• Dilated cardiomyopathy and neonatal lethality in mutant mice lacking manganese superoxide dismutase ↗ 1995 · 1,792 citations
• From discoveries in ageing research to therapeutics for healthy ageing ↗ 2019 · 1,451 citations
• Cellular Senescence Promotes Adverse Effects of Chemotherapy and Cancer Relapse ↗ 2016 · 1,366 citations
• Oxygen sensitivity severely limits the replicative lifespan of murine fibroblasts ↗ 2003 · 1,124 citations
• Unmasking Transcriptional Heterogeneity in Senescent Cells ↗ 2017 · 967 citations

Research funding

44 NIH awards · USD 28M total NIH RePORTER ↗

• Senescent cell mapping, identification and validation for human somatic and reproductive tissues National Institute on Aging · 2024 · USD 2M
• Senescent cell mapping, identification and validation for human somatic and reproductive tissues National Institute on Aging · 2023 · USD 2M
• Senescent cell mapping, identification and validation for human somatic and reproductive tissues National Institute on Aging · 2025 · USD 2M
• Mapping and validating senescent cells in human muscle, ovary and breast National Institute on Aging · 2022 · USD 1M
• Mapping and validating senescent cells in human muscle, ovary and breast National Institute on Aging · 2021 · USD 992K

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