My research vision for the Phillip tiME lab, at the interface of engineering and medicine, focuses on applying fundamental engineering principles to answer key questions in aging and cancer biology. To this end, our long term goal is to develop and translate discoveries and technologies from the laboratory into the medical arena to improve human health and longevity. Our initial approach is built on two overarching concepts/needs, which are to develop robust cell-based biomarkers of aging in health and disease (with the ability to stratify vulnerable individuals), and to establish research pipelines that explain the mechanistic relationships among age-related dysfunctions, disease progression and treatment responses.