Aaron Bender Email & Phone Number

I have always been drawn to why we are the way that we are, and biochemistry, cell biology, and molecular biology are the lenses through which I understand emergent properties of metabolism, health, and disease. I have studied a range of disease models including diabetes and metabolism, Alzheimer’s disease and neurodegeneration, and neural plasticity and regeneration. What underlies all the work is the effort to find what is driving the variability in the population. I earned a PhD in Biomedical Sciences from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, where I used gene regulatory networks to understand factors that diversify the clinical presentation of rare metabolic diseases. This approach informs my current role at The Helmsley Charitable Trust, where I support research projects that take genes, metabolites, enzymes, and bacterial strains identified as causal in the development of Crohn’s disease and carry these targets through a pipeline of therapeutic development. In all these projects, I continue to ask what are the genetic and environmental factors that separate people into severe, moderate, mild, or even sub-clinical disease cases? What metrics can serve as biomarkers that help to predict not only disease progression, but also therapeutic response? What underlying biology is shared between Crohn’s disease and other chronic inflammatory diseases that will help us develop new drugs or repurpose existing drugs? In this role, I am lucky to not only continue to ask why people are the way that they are, but also to push the question of how we can help people feel better. I’m always looking for people working in the fields of epithelial healing, gut microbiome, and inflammation who think creatively about developing new technologies or approaches to tailored therapies. I’m also wide open to people in unrelated fields who have unique approaches to therapeutic development.