Julie Andersen, PhD, is a professor at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. She joined the Buck Institute in 2000 and was promoted to professor in 2005. The Andersen Lab concentrates on understanding the underlying age-related processes that drive neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s. The lab has recently demonstrated a here-to-fore unrecognized role for a well-known aging process known as cellular senescence in Parkinsonian neurodegeneration. Current work in the lab is toward understanding the underlying mechanisms driving this process in the diseased brain toward the identification of novel therapeutics. Prior to her tenure at Buck Institute. Dr. Andersen was a faculty member at the University of Southern California, joining in 1993 as an Assistant Professor where she held the Paul F. Glenn Chair in Molecular and Cellular Gerontology. She was promoted to associate professor in 1999. Dr. Andersen has received numerous awards including a Brookdale National Fellowship, a Glenn Award in Biological Mechanisms of Aging, and a Senior Ellison Scholarship. She was elected Fellow of the Society for Free Radical Biology and Medicine in 2013. She serves on several national and international advisory boards and grant reviewing committees and as editor for several journals in the field. She earned her doctorate from the Department of Biological Chemistry, ULCA School of Medicine. She conducted her post-doctoral training in the laboratory of Dr. Xandra Breakefield in the Neurogenetics Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital East in the Department of Neurology, Harvard Medical School.