When Raghav Sehgal arrived at Yale as a graduate student several years ago, he wanted to explore the use of powerful computer science tools in cancer research. With an engineering background and a computational biology startup already under his belt, he was well prepared.
But as Sehgal began his Ph.D. studies, his thesis adviser at the Yale School of Medicine posed a larger question: If you want to solve cancer or any age-related disease, such as cardiovascular disease, why not solve aging itself?
"That put me on a different path," said Sehgal, an associate research scientist in psychiatry with specialties in computational biology and bioinformatics. "As researchers, we have a long way to go in understanding the aging process and whether the steps we take to manage it really work.