Completed a PhD in Biology at Concordia

I completed my PhD in Biology at Concordia in 2019, in Vladimir Titorenko’s lab, after five years studying how yeast cells age and what slows them down.

Yeast might seem like an odd choice for studying aging, but it is one of the most productive models in the field. Many of the pathways that control how cells sense nutrients, manage stress and maintain themselves over time are shared between yeast and humans. A yeast experiment can be run in days or weeks, which lets you ask questions and test ideas at a pace that is impossible in animals.

What the work produced

Six first-author papers, a set of plant extracts that delay aging, and a mechanism for the strongest of them: the willow extract PE21 slows aging by remodeling lipid metabolism.

The arc was straightforward on paper. First, screen a collection of plant extracts and find the ones that extend lifespan. Then pick the strongest and work out how it acts. In practice, each step took years of experiments that did not work the first time, controls that had to be redone, and results that only made sense after many repetitions.

Along the way, I built proteomics and lipidomics workflows on mass spectrometry, presented at conferences, and mentored nine students, all of whom went on to publish.

The mass spectrometry work mattered more than it might sound. Proteomics measures thousands of proteins at once, and lipidomics does the same for lipids. Together, they let you see how a whole cell changes in response to a treatment, rather than guessing which few molecules to measure. Building those workflows taught me to handle large, noisy datasets and to be careful about what the numbers really say. Those skills have stayed with me in every project since.

Papers age. People you trained keep doing science long after your experiments are forgotten.

What a PhD really trains

People think a PhD trains you in a topic. It actually trains you in uncertainty: designing experiments when nobody knows the answer, and deciding what to believe when the data are messy.

Coursework teaches you what is already known. Research is about what is not. Most experiments fail, and the ones that work often raise more questions than they answer. A PhD is where you learn to keep going anyway, to separate a real effect from noise, and to change your mind when the evidence demands it. That is the part that transfers to any field, whether you stay in academia or not.

It also trains you in patience. Five years is a long time to work on one set of questions. You learn to plan in months, not days, and to accept that the most important results usually take the longest.

My perspective

The part I am proudest of is the students. Papers age. People you trained keep doing science long after your experiments are forgotten.

Mentoring was not a side task for me. Teaching someone how to plan an experiment, read data critically and write it up properly is a direct contribution to science, even if it never appears on a publication list as my own work. Seeing every one of those students go on to publish meant more to me than any single paper.

That is still how I measure a good research environment: not only by what it produces, but by who leaves it better trained than when they arrived.