I earned my Ph.D. in pathology at University of Washington in Seattle. My dissertation work focused on reversing age-related problems that lead to heart failure in mice using an anti-aging drug intervention. My work as a postdoc, and then as an assistant professor in the Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology department at the University of Michigan has been to develop the first multicellular model system for studying polyphosphate, an ancient molecule that plays many cellular roles, possibly including aging. I teach a course for senior undergraduates and graduate students about the basic biology of aging.