Dr. Melov was the third faculty hire at the Buck Institute when it opened its doors in 1999 and currently serves as co-director of the Institute’s Mouse Phenotyping and Single-Cell Biology cores. An Australian, Dr. Melov obtained his bachelor’s degree in human genetics from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and then completed his PhD in biochemistry at Imperial College London in the United Kingdom. He carried out postdoctoral studies on the genetics of aging at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and on mitochondrial disease at Emory University in the Department of Molecular Medicine. He also holds adjunct appointments at the Andrus College of Gerontology, University of Southern California, and Dominican University of California in San Rafael.

Dr. Melov is facile in multiple aspects of aging biology, which is now termed geroscience. He has published more than 100 papers and has twice received the Glenn Award for Research in Biological Mechanisms of Aging. He was the first faculty member at the Buck Institute to receive a senior scholarship from the Ellison Medical Foundation. He was one of the founding editors of the highly respected journal Aging Cell and served as the inaugural and founding chair of the Gordon Research Conference on Oxidative Stress and Disease.