Category: Province

The 2026 Dean’s Impact Award focuses on “Honoring the Focused Excellence of Exemplary Clinicians and Researchers.”
Recipients of the Dean’s Impact Awards represent the compassion, innovation, and commitment required to build dynamic, meaningful, and community-focused efforts to improve clinical care, education, and research. Congratulations to Dr. Michael Province on receiving this honor!

Despite decades of study, the genetic, molecular and environmental influences that drive extended health span and delayed onset of age-related disease are not fully understood. A multidisciplinary team of researchers plans to address this gap by creating interpretable graph neural network models capable of integrating large, multi-omic datasets collected from centenarians and other long-lived individuals with a three-year, $1.53 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop transparent artificial intelligence (AI) models that may reveal the biological underpinnings of exceptional human longevity.

The Long Life Family Study project, led by Michael Province, PhD, was recently renewed by the National Institute on Aging for $80 Million dollars over 5 years (2U19AG063893-06), to perform sequencing effort as well as recruit new families. PacBio and LLFS expect to begin sequencing in Q4 2025 at the McDonnell Genome Institute at WashU Medicine, with an initial tranche of ~5,500 samples, and the full ~7,800- sample program spanning five years.

Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has received a $68 million grant to investigate and discover what contributes to extreme longevity. The researchers are studying hundreds of families — over several generations — with individuals who have had exceptionally long lives. Many of these families have unusual concentrations of people living to at least age 100.