Biomarkers of Aging Consortium to Hold a Colloquium on the Physics of Aging at Harvard
Biomarkers of Aging Consortium to Hold a Colloquium on the Physics of Aging at Harvard
On July 28, Biomarkers of Aging Consortium announced a one-day Gerophysics Workshop, which will take place on October 6 at Harvard Medical School in Boston. The organizers are accepting abstracts for short talks. The day will conclude with a collaborative session at the board.
Gerophysics seeks measurable quantities in aging and the rules that govern how they change. Observable age-related changes define state variables, while a mathematical model describes their trajectories and predicts the outcome of an intervention. When two models make different predictions for the same measurement, an experiment can distinguish between them.
On the program page, the organizers ask whether biological aging should be understood as inevitable thermodynamic decay or as a property of complex dynamical systems subject to specific constraints. The program also covers theories of aging, constraints on living matter, energy dissipation, and irreversibility.
The announced participants include Peter Fedichev, Uri Alon, Maximilian Unfried, László Barabási, and Jesse Poganik. During the shared board session, participants will discuss mathematical frameworks, paradoxes, and problems for further study.
This discussion has a recent history. In a report published on May 14, 2026, participants in the first Global Conference on Gerophysics described a meeting held in Singapore, where 160 people and 31 speakers gathered on March 5–6, 2025. They proposed collecting compatible data, developing physical definitions of aging and rejuvenation, building models that predict the effects of interventions, and linking data from different species with human studies.
The colloquium brings theories of aging together around a testable question: which observations and intervention outcomes should a model predict? In October, this question will form the focus of a dedicated program and a shared discussion at the board.