Dr. Victoria Lunyak is the Founder, CEO and President of Aelan Cell Technologies. Victoria’s areas of expertise include epigenetics, genomics, stem cell research, regenerative medicine, biological inheritance and cell fate determination. She has carried out research at world-leading institutions, including Brown University, the University of California and, most recently, at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. Her research discoveries have been published in Science, Cell, Genes and Development, and other journals. Victoria has more than 5,000 citations, and many of her scientific innovations are patented and licensed worldwide.

Victoria’s early work on “the dark matter" of the human genome was on the frontier of a “post-genomic era” revolution. Her lab demonstrated that it is possible to achieve reversal of human adult stem cell aging by genetic manipulation of non-coding RNA. Victoria’s lab also identified changes in chromatin that occur upon the aging of human stem cells and created a set of novel reagents that can be used to identify aging stem cells in a clinical setting. These new findings not only allow the visualization of human adult stem and somatic cells with broken DNA repair mechanisms, but can also be used as a tool to estimate the rate of organismal aging.

Dr. Lunyak received her Master of Science degree in Biophysics from St. Petersburg Polytechnic University (formerly known as Leningrad Polytechnic Institute) in St. Petersburg, Russia, and earned her PhD in Molecular Biology from the Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute at the Russian Academy of Science in St. Petersburg, Russia.  She completed her postdoctoral work at Brown University and at the University of California, San Diego, before becoming a faculty member in the Department of Medicine at UCSD. Dr. Lunyak was most recently at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she led research in the epigenetics of stem cell aging.