Course Identification

Why do we age? The human body is a wondrous system. It is able to maintain healthy function for decades despite strong molecular and environmental insults. The circuits that enable our body to function so robustly have specific fragilities that lead to diseases and aging. This course will provide basic principles for understanding human aging in terms of physiological circuits and concepts for making sense of disease processes and their dynamics. The course will include guitar songs and other enjoyable methods to improve attention and learning.

SYLLABUS

• Theories of aging, evolution of aging
• How aging is studied, model organisms, human demography and epidemiology
• What sets the rate of aging? quantifying aging, aging clocks, frailty index
• Physiological changes in aging
• Age-related diseases as bifurcations in physiological circuits
• Mathematical models of aging and damage accumulation
• Longevity interventions
• Aging and society

Upon successful completion of this course students should be able to:

1. Understand human aging  in terms of general mathematical principles that unify different systems.
2. Describe the aging of physiological systems and their diseases using simple mathematical models, and generate new hypotheses that can be tested experimentally.

Main textbook: U. Alon, Systems Medicine. CRC Press (2023)

Additional reading:

U. Alon, An Introduction to Systems Biology: design principles of biological circuits. CRC press (2006).

S. Stearns, R. Medzhitov, Evolutionary Medicine, Sinauer (2016)

S. Strogatz, Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos: with applications to physics, biology, chemistry and engineering, CRC press (2000).