Jan Vijg, Ph.D., is Professor and Chairman of the Department of Genetics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York since July 2008. He received his Ph.D. at the University of Leiden, The Netherlands, in 1987. From 1990 to 1993 he was founder and Scientific Director of Ingeny B.V., a Dutch Biotechnology company. In 1993 he moved to Boston, to take up a position as Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. In 1998 he accepted an offer from the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, Texas, to become a Professor in the Department of Physiology.

From 2006 to 2008 he was a Professor at the Buck Institute for Age Research in Novato, California. With his research team, he was the first to develop transgenic mouse models for studying mutagenesis in vivo (in 1989) and has used these models ever since in studying the relationship between damage to the genome and aging. He has published well over 300 scientific articles and three books and is inventor or co-inventor on 8 patents.