Dale E. Bredesen, MD, is Professor and Founding President of the Buck Institute for Age Research, and Adjunct Professor, Department of Neurology, University of California, San Francisco. He received his undergraduate degree from Caltech and his MD from Duke University School of Medicine. He was a resident in internal medicine at Duke, and then resident and chief resident in neurology at UCSF. He was an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Nobel laureate Prof. Stanley Prusiner, then Assistant and Associate Professor at UCLA, the Elizabeth R. and Thomas E. Plott Chair in Gerontology at UCLA, then the Director of the Program on Aging at the Burnham Institute in La Jolla. In 1998, he was recruited to the Buck Institute For Age Research, the nation’s only independent research institute focused on aging and age-associated disease, as the Founding President.

He is a member of the National Advisory Council on Aging, the Society For Neuroscience, and the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. He has co-authored over 180 scientific papers and three books. His laboratory focuses on programmed cell death in the nervous system and discovered and characterized dependence receptors, which mediate cell death during neural development, neurodegeneration and oncogenesis. He has received numerous awards and lectureships, including the Cotzias Award from the American Parkinson’s Disease Association, the Cherkin Award in Neurodegenerative Disease Research from UCLA, the Lou and Eleanor Gehrig Lectureship from Columbia University, the Landa Family Lectureship in Neurodegenerative Disease from the University of Utah, and the Gilman-Barbour Distinguished Lectureship at the University of Michigan.