Steve Horvath
Professor of Medicine (Division of Geriatrics); Director of Aging Biology Research, Department of Medicine · David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
Los Angeles, CA, United States
Impact
Steve Horvath is a geroscientist and biostatistician best known for developing DNA methylation-based epigenetic clocks. With UCLA colleagues he published an epigenetic clock for saliva in 2011 and, in 2013, the pan-tissue clock widely called the Horvath clock; he is a primary developer of the PhenoAge and GrimAge clocks and led the international Mammalian Methylation Consortium, which produced universal clocks applicable across mammalian species. Epigenetic age exceeding chronological age has been associated with higher all-cause mortality risk, and these clocks are used as outcome measures in human studies and trials such as DO-HEALTH and in the Women's Health Initiative. Horvath was a professor of Human Genetics and Biostatistics at UCLA for 22 years, then spent about 4.5 years in industry, including as a principal investigator at Altos Labs, before returning to the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA on 1 July 2026. He is co-founder and chair of the scientific advisory board of the non-profit Clock Foundation. He received the 2026 Luminary Award of the Precision Medicine World Conference.
Metrics
- h-index 161 · google scholar as of 2026-09-23 source ↗
Research output
1,018 works · 144,773 citations · h-index 152 OpenAlex ↗
Selected publications
- WGCNA: an R package for weighted correlation network analysis ↗ 2008 · 30,199 citations
- DNA methylation age of human tissues and cell types ↗ 2013 · 7,603 citations
- A General Framework for Weighted Gene Co-Expression Network Analysis ↗ 2005 · 6,137 citations
- An epigenetic biomarker of aging for lifespan and healthspan ↗ 2018 · 3,836 citations
- An anatomically comprehensive atlas of the adult human brain transcriptome ↗ 2012 · 3,410 citations
Research funding
40 NIH awards · USD 11M total NIH RePORTER ↗
- Systems Approach to Sjogren's Syndrome Pathogenesis (SASSP) National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research · 2009 · USD 886K
- Systems Approach to Sjogren's Syndrome Pathogenesis (SASSP) National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research · 2010 · USD 879K
- Validation and optimization of epigenetic clocks National Institute on Aging · 2020 · USD 621K
- Validation and optimization of epigenetic clocks National Institute on Aging · 2018 · USD 594K
- Validation and optimization of epigenetic clocks National Institute on Aging · 2019 · USD 564K
Links
Research fields
Sources & review · profile last updated 2026-09-29
- https://www.uclahealth.org/news/article/leader-study-longevity-returning-ucla-health 2026-09-23
- https://horvathaginglab.org/people 2026-09-23
- https://agingpharma.org/speakers/steve-horvath/ 2026-09-23
- https://clockfoundation.org/ 2026-09-23
- https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=mEM8q5cAAAAJ 2026-09-23
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-026-04524-1 2026-09-23
- https://ipscell.com/2026/05/did-altos-labs-just-reprogram-itself-to-focus-on-ai-peter-walter-steve-horvath-more-departures/ 2026-09-23
- https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/851457272 2026-09-23