Funding ambitious research in longevity and neuroscience
Grants
We’ve funded research, initiatives, and programs making breakthroughs in aging science
Our mission is to engage skilled researchers and support ambitious ideas in the longevity and neuroscience fields. In the past few years, we have donated over $30M to research spanning neurogenesis, the aggregome, centenarian genetics, cryopreservation, and germline rejuvenation.
Featured
With direction from our advisory board, we have produced reports that enumerate and prioritize the most important longevity and neuroscience research for donors
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Forest Neurotech Announces New Funding
Convergent Research announces $18M in funding for Forest Neurotech with support from Eric Schmidt, Griffin Catalyst, the Riley & Susan Bechtel Foundation, and James Fickel.
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Aging is No Blessing
Policy and ethics lead Raiany Romanni writes for Palladium Magazine. “By our first full decade of life, we’d never think to ask: why did lobsters grow wise and strong, while we grew wise and frail?”
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Bottlenecks of Aging
A comprehensive report from our scientific advisory board and team consisting of bottlenecks of the field, and specific actionable projects that can unlock progress.
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XPrize Launch
Our policy and ethics lead, Raiany Romanni, writes about the recent $101M XPrize launch to extend human healthspan.
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Brain Aging White Paper
Led by Amaranth internal lead Rohan Krajeski, this paper explores understudied approaches to brain aging — endogenous neurogenesis, exogenous replacement of cells and tissues, extracellular matrix repair, and learning from non-model organisms.
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Spatial Multiplexing Technology
Partially funded by Amaranth, the Boyden lab at MIT has developed a way to simultaneously image up to five different molecules within a cell, by targeting glowing reporters to distinct locations inside the cell.
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Summer Course on Aging
The Biology of Aging course teaches newcomer scientists the fundamentals of geroscience. It is led by Jennifer Garrison and William Mair in partnership with the Marine Biological Laboratory.
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Time Initiative
In partnership with the American Federation of Aging Research and led by Amaranth’s internal lead, Courtney Hudson-Paz, the Time Initiative’s goal is to accelerate young talent in aging biology through a fellowship program. Meet the 2023 fellows here!
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Amaranth Prize
The Amaranth Prize powered by Research Portfolio gives no-strings-attached funding to the best research in longevity. It rewards research retrospectively. See the winning papers for the 2023 prize on protein aging here.
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Impetus Grants
Impetus Grants provide fast grants up to $500k within 3 weeks for scientists to work on aging biology. It is led by Amaranth board member Martin Borsch Jensen and Lada Nuzhna.
Our Team
We are a group of scientists and entrepreneurs accelerating transformative biotechnologies
Core Team
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James is an early Ethereum investor and founded Amaranth to accelerate research in longevity.
He assembled Amaranth’s scientific advisory board, a group of young leaders in longevity biotech, to source and evaluate ambitious research covering the aggregome, centenarian genetics, cryopreservation, germline rejuvenation and brain aging. He has backed the Norn Group, Impetus Grants, the SuperAgers Family Initiative, the Time Initiative Undergraduate Fellows Program, the MBL Aging Course, as well as labs from Harvard, MIT, and Stanford.
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Rohan is currently a PhD student in Biotechnology (Molecular Neuroscience) at the University of Cambridge where he develops brain organoid models to study neurodegenerative diseases. He is co-advised by Prof. Gabriele Kaminski Schierle and Dr Madeline Lancaster.
Rohan has an extensive scientific background in genetic engineering and neuroscience, having previously worked at MIT in the Abudayyeh-Gootenberg Lab, the University of Oxford and University College London (UCL). At Amaranth, Rohan focuses on brain aging.
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Courtney joined Jennifer Garrison’s lab at the Buck Institute as a postdoctoral research fellow in 2022 to understand how the brain regulates feeding behaviors on different timescales. Courtney received her bachelor's degree in biopsychology from UC Santa Barbara in 2015 and her PhD from USC in 2022.
At Amaranth, Courtney leads the undergraduate fellows program in association with AFAR, called the Time Initiative. Through this initiative, she catalyzes students' interest in aging biology, fosters community, and connects them to the resources they need to make a meaningful difference in the field.
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Raiany spends most of her time thinking about how converging technologies will transform governments and human nature in the coming decades.
She's particularly interested in why secular humans like to narrate aging as a net-positive, teleological phenomenon — and in the negative effects of this narrative on economies and people. Her work has appeared in outlets like The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Forbes, and ABC. Raiany is currently working on a book aimed at shifting the ethics, policy and philosophy of life extension.
Advisory Board
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Martin is the CSO of Gordian Biotechnology, which develops pooled in vivo therapeutic screening to find effective therapies against underserved diseases of aging. He is also the president of the Norn Group, a non-profit supporting projects to accelerate aging research, including Impetus Grants and the Longevity Apprenticeship.
Prior to his current role, Martin was a K99 Fellow in the Jasper Lab at the Buck Institute, where he conducted research on a range of cellular mechanisms involved in aging, such as mitochondrial function, NAD metabolism, DNA damage signaling, and stress responses. Martin received his PhD in Biogerontology from the National Institute of Aging and University of Copenhagen in Vilhelm Bohr’s lab.
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Aaron is the CEO of Revel Pharmaceuticals, which develops repair based therapies for aging and disease. He co-founded Revel in 2019 to focus on clearing the excess accumulation of toxic proteins and metabolites implicated in aging.
Before Revel, Aaron worked at Google X and consulted for various biotech companies. Aaron has over eight years of experience in Revel’s platform technologies of enzyme discovery and engineering, and received his PhD in Bioengineering from Stanford University advised by Dr. Christina Smolke. Aaron holds a bachelors of mathematics from the University of Rochester.
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Alex joined Laura Deming to build the next evolution of the Longevity Fund, called age1, as General Partner, to invest in and catalyze ambitious founder-led longevity biotech companies.
Previously he was Chief of Staff at the Amaranth Foundation where he built out the longevity focus of the family office. Alex completed his PhD in Genetics at Stanford University in Tom Rando's lab studying the biology of aging after having worked in Boston in management consulting at Putnam Associates, a boutique life sciences consulting firm.
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Laura is a cofounder and Venture Partner of age1 and was previously the founder and General Partner of The Longevity Fund. Her work focuses on human life extension and using biological research to reduce the effects of aging.
Laura took graduate coursework at UCSF before going to MIT to study physics, which she eventually dropped out of to become a Thiel Fellow. She’s worked in the Kenyon, Guarente, Weiss and Firestein labs on a number of topics, including aging and synthetic biology. Laura founded the Longevity Fund in 2011, the first VC firm dedicated to funding longevity companies, which raised $37M and has had 5 IPOs with portfolio companies raising over a billion dollars in follow-on funding. The Longevity Fund has backed leading longevity biotechs including Loyal, Gordian, Fauna Biotech, Spring Discovery, Arda Therapeutics, and Rubedo Life Sciences.
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Kristen is the co-founder and CEO of BioAge, a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing a pipeline of therapies to extend healthy lifespan by targeting the molecular causes of aging.
Kristen’s scientific background is in aging biology and bioinformatics. She received her PhD in Medical Biophysics from the University of Toronto, followed by postdoctoral training at Stanford University, where she was a fellow of the Ellison Medical Foundation & American Federation for Aging Research. She is an advisor to multiple biotechnology companies. In 2023, Fierce Pharma named Kristen as one of the most influential people in biopharma.
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Joanne is currently at Princeton and the Boyden Lab at MIT, where she works on tools for brain aging including spatial proteomics and whole brain modeling. Previously, she was a Thiel Fellow, where she worked on mitochondrial dynamics at the Biomedical Institute at MaRS, COVID testing at Curative, and cancer research at the Buck Institute.
Joanne has been supported by the Thiel Fellowship, Interact Fellowship, Day One Project, the Institute for Progress, the Davis UWC Foundation, and VitaDAO.
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Adam is the CEO of Convergent Research, launching Focused Research Organizations (FROs), such as E11 bio and Cultivarium. He also serves on the boards of several non-profits pursuing new methods of funding and organizing scientific research including Norn Group, New Science, and Amaranth.
Previously, he was a Schmidt Futures Innovation Fellow, a consultant for the Astera Institute, a Fellow with the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), a research scientist at Google DeepMind, Chief Strategy Officer of the brain-computer interface company Kernel, a research scientist at MIT, a PhD student in biophysics with George Church and colleagues at Harvard, and a theoretical physics student at Yale. He also previously helped to start companies like BioBright, and advised foundations such as the Open Philanthropy Project. His work has been recognized with a Technology Review 35 Innovators Under 35 Award (2018), a Fannie and John Hertz Foundation Fellowship (2010) and a Goldwater Scholarship (2008).
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