Jude M. Phillip, PhD

Jude M. Phillip, PhD, is the Salisbury Scholar. He is an Assistant Professor in Biomedical Engineering, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Oncology, Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center, Core Member, Institute for Nanobiotechnology (INBT), and the Whiting School of Engineering. His project focuses on developing a deeper understanding of the aging hallmark—senescence, at single-cell resolution. Over the years, there have been many exciting studies showing the context-dependent roles of senescence. For instance, it’s beneficial in biological processes like wound healing, development, and cancer suppression, but at the same time it is shown to drive aging-related inflammation, immune dysfunction, and tumorigenesis. Ultimately, we hope to develop more effective ways to identify and classify senescent cells both in ex vivo cultures and within tissues, understand what molecular factors drive the emergence of the different senescence subtypes so that we can differentially target the adverse (“bad”) senescence subtypes with drugs or engineered immune cells, and lastly, we want to connect the presence and abundance of senescence subtypes with various aging-related diseases.