Siegfried Hekimi was born in Zürich and obtained his undergraduate degree in Biology at the University of Geneva. He then moved to the famed Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) of the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, UK, to collaborate with Dr J.G. White as a post-doctoral fellow of the Swiss National Science Fund. It is at the LMB where Hekimi developed his interest for using 'the worm' for translational studies in the biology of aging. It is also in Cambridge that he identified the first mutants that helped to demonstrate that aging could be manipulated genetically and that inducing mild mitochondrial dysfunction could in fact slow down the aging process of animals. In 1992 he joined McGill University where he has been a full professor since 2004.