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Portrait of Oliver Hahn, Ph.D.

Oliver Hahn, Ph.D.

Principal Investigator

Oliver focuses on disentangling the mechanisms driving aging of the white matter tracts, a critical part of the brain responsible for signal transduction between the many individual regions of the brain.

About

White matter tracts appear to be one of the first brain regions that undergo aging. Oliver researches ways to identify the underlying intercellular networks by establishing discovery platforms for in vitro and in vivo work that span functional genomics, high-throughput sequencing, and advanced imaging approaches.

Before joining Calico, Oliver was a postdoctoral scholar in Tony Wyss-Coray’s lab at Stanford, where he established multiomic sequencing methods to measure the rate of aging across tissues, brain regions and cell types. This led to the discovery that a part of the brain – the white matter tracts – age faster than the rest of the brain. At the core of this “aging hotspot,” Oliver found hyperactive microglia and deteriorating oligodendrocytes, which resemble features observed in patients of Alzheimer’s disease

Education:
  • Postdoc in Neuroscience, Stanford University
  • Ph.D. in Genetics, Max-Planck-Institute for Biology of Ageing, Cologne
  • M.Sc. in Systems Biology, Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg
  • B.Sc. in Molecular Biotechnology, Technical University of Munich