Dr. Glen Pridham

Glen Pridham always wanted to be a physicist—in graduate school, he taught in courses like Oscillations and Waves, and Machine Learning—but his curiosity for biological systems and desire for tangible positive impact drew him to researching medical problems. Before beginning his doctoral research, he was a research assistant in the Departments of Radiology and Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Calgary in Canada.

For his PhD in Physics at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, Dr. Pridham pioneered research at the intersection of physics and aging, using innovative modeling techniques to significantly advance our understanding of the aging process. This included multiple contributions to understanding and forecasting geriatric health trajectories.

By now a winner of many prestigious prizes and scholarships, Dr. Pridham chose the Sagol Center for Longevity Research in the Weizmann Institute of Science’s Department of Molecular Cell Biology because it employed physics-style mathematical models to study aging. Israel’s unique model of health maintenance organizations with access to data on millions of individuals made it a good place for his investigation of why age is a (near) universal risk factor for declining health, how best to monitor its effects at the individual level, and potentially, how to find targets to slow aging. This has important ramifications for both individual and public health.