Dr. John S Torday – Lundquist Institute/UCLA — Aging And Disease as a Process Of Reverse Evolution
Dr. John Torday, Ph.D. is an Investigator at The Lundquist Institute of Biomedical Innovation, a Professor of Pediatrics and Obstetrics/Gynecology, and Faculty, Evolutionary Medicine, at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, and Director of the Perinatal Research Training Program, the Guenther Laboratory for Cell-Molecular Biology, and Faculty in the Division of Neonatology, at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center.
Dr. Torday’s laboratory is the first to have determined the repertoire of lung alveolar growth using well-established principles for cell-cell communication. This highly regulated structure allowed us to track the evolution of lung development and phylogeny from its unicellular roots. The lung can be used as a model to understand the evolution of other physiological properties such as those in the skin, kidney, liver, gut and central nervous systems. This basic understanding of how and why physiologic evolution occurs is helpful in diagnosing and treating disease.
Dr. Torday earned his undergraduate degree from Boston University in Biology and English, as well as his MSc and Ph.D. in Experimental Medicine, from McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He completed a Reproductive Endocrinology Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI.
Dr. Torday has published more than 350 abstracts and 150 peer-reviewed papers. He has recently developed an interest in evolutionary aspects of comparative development and physiology. This led to the publication 12 peer-reviewed papers on the cellular roots of vertebrate anatomy, culminating in a book Evolutionary Biology: Cell-Cell Communication, Complex Disease.
Dr. Torday has also co-authored or co-edited several books, including Evolution, The Logic of Biology Evidence-Based Evolutionary Medicine Morphogenesis Environmental Stress and Reverse Evolution and, most recently, The Singularity of Nature A Convergence of Biology Chemistry and Physics.
Source:
