Marco Demaria

Head of Cellular Senescence and Age-related Pathologies, Director Research Institute MoHAD Profile

Head of Cellular Senescence and Age-related Pathologies, Director Research Institute MoHAD

Marco Demaria is Full Professor of Cellular Ageing and Senescence at the University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG), University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Since July 2023, he serves as Director of the research institute Mechanisms of Health, Ageing and Disease (MoHAD), where he leads interdisciplinary efforts to understand the biological mechanisms driving ageing and age-related diseases.

He obtained his PhD from the University of Torino (Italy), where he investigated the role of the transcription factor STAT3 as a master regulator of cancer cell survival and metabolism. In 2010, he joined the laboratory of Prof. Judith Campisi at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging (California, USA), where he focused on unraveling the complex phenotypes and functional heterogeneity of senescent cells. During this period, he also began developing therapeutic strategies to target the detrimental effects of cellular senescence.

In September 2015, he joined the European Research Institute for the Biology of Ageing (ERIBA) and UMCG as a tenure-track professor and established the laboratory Cellular Senescence and Age-related Pathologies. His research aims to understand the cell non-autonomous functions of senescent cells and their context-dependent roles in tissue repair, cancer, inflammation, and organismal ageing. A central objective of his work is to distinguish beneficial from detrimental senescence programs and to identify molecular targets for precise senotherapeutic interventions.

His laboratory is supported by multiple national and international funding agencies and collaborates extensively across academia, clinical research, and industry. In 2018, he co-founded Cleara Biotech, a biotechnology company focused on the development of targeted anti-senescence therapies.

Professor Demaria plays an active role in the international scientific community. He serves as Editor-in-Chief of the open-access journal Aging-US and has held leadership positions within the International Cell Senescence Association (ICSA), contributing to the advancement and standardization of senescence research worldwide.