March 6, 2026

11am - 12pm
Biomedical Sciences Research Building, Room 483

Dr. Karen Sears
Professor in the Departments of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology at UCLA

"Unlocking the secrets of long life: What bats can teach us about healthy aging"

Speaker Bio: Karen E. Sears earned her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago’s Committee on Evolutionary Biology in 2003 and is currently a Professor in the Departments of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology at UCLA. Her lab seeks to harness the diversity of mammals to identify processes driving change in organisms during their lives and in lineages over time, and inform challenges in human health. Current topics of study include the developmental basis of the unique phenotypes of bats and marsupials and the developmental, cellular, and molecular basis of aging in bats.

Talk Title: Unlocking the secrets of long life: What bats can teach us about healthy aging
Talk Description: Many bats live exceptionally long lives with minimal signs of biological aging, despite high metabolic demands. However, because of historical difficulties in estimating the chronological age of wild bats, it has proven challenging to broadly investigate the drivers of these phenomena in tissues from bats from across the clade. Here, we leverage newly developed methylation-based clocks to estimate chronological age in wild bats, enabling the most phylogenetically comprehensive study to date of age-related cellular and molecular processes in this group. By extending previous findings from isolated species to a broader taxonomic sample, our study demonstrates that bats combine enhanced genome maintenance, stable antioxidant defenses, and selective repair pathway regulation to minimize age-associated cellular decline. These results provide new insights into the evolutionary innovations underlying healthy aging and exceptional longevity in mammals.