Richard Hodes will retire as director of the US National Institute on Aging on December 7 after 33 years in the role, during which its budget grew from $400 million to $4.6 billion, according to NIH

Richard Hodes will retire as director of the US National Institute on Aging on December 7 after 33 years in the role, during which its budget grew from $400 million to $4.6 billion, according to NIH

On November 4, US National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Jay Bhattacharya announced Hodes’s retirement. Acting Deputy Director Kenneth Santora will lead the National Institute on Aging (NIA) until a permanent director is selected. Hodes will remain at NIH as a special volunteer and mentor.

>NIA is one of NIH’s 27 institutes and centers and awards grants for research on aging and age-related diseases. Hodes has led it since 1993, serving for 33 of its 52 years. Its budget was $400 million when he took office and reached $4.6 billion in 2026, according to the NIH statement (the amount approved by Congress was $4.52 billion).

Four-fifths of the increase from 1993 to 2025 came in the ten years beginning in 2015: the budget rose from $1.2 billion to $4.5 billion over that period. Dementia funding accounted for most of this growth. Following the 2011 law establishing a national plan to address Alzheimer’s disease, Congress began allocating funds specifically for dementia. From 2016 to 2024, annual increases ranged from $90 million to $425 million, totaling about $2.8 billion of the $3.3 billion increase over nine years. The largest increase came in 2019 and the smallest in 2024. The budget barely grew in 2025 and 2026.

Dementia accounts for more than 70 percent of NIA’s grant funding, Hodes wrote in the 2025 budget justification. The same document requested about 8 percent of the budget for the Division of Aging Biology. In March 2024, Santora, then head of NIA’s grants division, wrote on the NIA blog that in fiscal year 2024, the institute generally awarded dementia grants at the full amounts recommended by reviewers, while cutting approved grants on other topics by an average of 16 percent. Santora will now serve as the institute’s interim director.

The NIH statement describes Hodes as one of the founders of geroscience. In a 2022 interview, he explained the idea behind it:

“Understanding the basic cellular and molecular mechanisms of aging itself could allow us to alter the risk of many age-related diseases at once.”

NIH held its first geroscience summit in 2013. The fifth will take place on December 2–3, just before Hodes retires, with goals that include a geroscience roadmap for the next three to five years. Hodes also oversaw SenNet, an NIH program to map senescent cells in human tissues. These cells have stopped dividing but release substances that can damage neighboring cells.

In March, the lobbying group A4LI asked Congress to raise the Division of Aging Biology’s budget from $346 million to $1 billion for 2027. On the day Hodes’s retirement was announced, the group wrote that the institute’s budget growth “reflects the case he has made for years: aging research is public health research.”

Under the law, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. appoints the NIA director, acting through the NIH director. In the selection of a director for the National Institute of Mental Health, Kennedy rejected NIH Director Bhattacharya’s recommendation, according to an October 23 report in Science. One of the magazine’s sources said Kennedy wants to offer the position to a candidate whom the NIH search committee did not recommend.

NIA is currently funded at its 2026 level under a temporary funding measure passed by Congress. The measure expires on December 11, four days after Hodes retires. The administration requested $4.217 billion for 2027, 7 percent less than Congress approved for 2026.