Dr Tea Shavlakadze is Director at the Aging/Age-Associated Disorders at Regeneron Pharmaceuticals (New York, USA). Her research focuses on drug discovery aimed at targeting pathways that create a permissive environment for, or directly induce, age-related changes and diseases. From 2014-2020, Dr Shavlakadze was an investigator at Novartis Institutes of Biomedical Research (Cambridge, USA) where she focused on discovery and perturbation of age-related signalling pathways to treat age-related disorders. Prior to joining the industry, Dr Shavlakadze obtained her PhD (2001-2005) from the University of Western Australia (UWA) and was then an Associate Professor at UWA from 2005 to 2014. At UWA, she conducted independent research on factors that contribute to the loss of skeletal muscle mass and function and established a broad biomedical research program on skeletal muscle aging.