The Tinbergen Society of Merton College is delighted to welcome Professor Dame Linda Partridge FRS FRSE FMedSci to Merton College for its 2023 Annual Lecture.

Everyone knows: no one can escape ageing. But what causes ageing, and why hasn’t evolution fought against its inevitability? These are fundamental questions, combining evolutionary biology, genetics, physiology, and biochemistry. For four decades Dame Linda has been at the forefront of answering them; founding the ageing research field with her renowned experiments, particularly with the Drosophila fruit fly. In this talk, Dame Linda will give an authoritative overview of her groundbreaking research into ageing – and propose an answer to a question relevant to everyone – can it be cured?

Dame Linda is currently the founding Director of the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing, in Cologne, and also a Professorial Research Fellow at UCL. She has built an extraordinary research career studying how diet, signalling pathways, and drugs can experimentally alter lifespan, in order to discover genes and mechanisms that determine the rate of ageing. Her work has defined a field, and seen her awarded the Frink Medal (1999), the Darwin-Wallace Medal (2008), the Croonian Lecture (2009), and the Mendel Medal (2021), and was made a Dame in 2009.

Talk starts at 5.15pm, with a Q&A afterwards. All are welcome.