Hormones and Long Life: Lessons from Dwarf Mice

Dr. Holly Brown-Borg will be presenting at the University Faculty Lecture on Thursday, January 21. The lecture is at the North Dakota Museum of Art. The reception begins at 4:00 pm, and the lecture at 4:30 pm. Press Release: Dr. Holly Brown-Borg is associate professor in the University of North Dakota School of Medicine and Health Sciences Department of Pharmacology, Physiology, and Therapeutics. Brown-Borg has built a distinguished and internationally recognized career as a biomedical researcher and teacher with a number of highly regarded and regularly referenced publications, including books and book chapters. Brown-Borg is especially well known for her work on aging. Early in her career, she gained international notice for discovering that a certain strain of experimental dwarf mice lived longer than all other kinds of mice used in research. Brown-Borg’s primary research interest focuses on aging, stress resistance, longevity, and growth hormones. She earned her undergraduate degree in agriculture at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1984. She received her Master’s of Science in Animal Science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1986 and her PhD in Physiology at North Carolina State University in 1990. She served as a research associate in endocrinology at the U.S. Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service Meat Animal Research Center and in physiology at Southern Illinois University. She joined the faculty at the UND medical school in 1995. Brown-Borg is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, among them an unprecedented $60,000 award from the Glenn Foundation (unsolicited) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Research Service Award. Brown-Borg’s lab first made waves in the aging research community in 1996 with a paper in the international science journal Nature about Ames dwarf mice living longer than normal mice. Her current research focuses on identifying mechanisms of stress resistance associated with health and longevity, using one of only six Ames dwarf mice colonies in the United States. She compares stress factors caused by metabolic oxidation in the dwarf mice compared to those in normal mice. She also has been awarded the status of Fellow in the Gerontological Society of America. The GSA Fellows represent the highest class of membership and are recognized by their peers for outstanding contributions to the field of gerontology, the branch of science that deals with aging and the special problems of aged persons. Brown-Borg, who has been conducting studies on aging since 1995, has received funding from the NIH and the American Federation of Aging Research over the last 10 years. Her current funding includes an NIH RO1 in the amount of $1,387,000 and a Senior Scholar Award from the Ellison Medical Foundation for $803,525. Internationally recognized in her field, Brown-Borg co-chaired the Gordon Research Conference on the Biology of Aging in 2007 in Switzerland; she is President-Elect of the American Aging Association and Chair-elect of the Biological Sciences section of the Gerontological Society of America; and she organizes the International Symposium on the Neurobiology and Neuroendocrinology of Aging held in Austria every other year.

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