The Gerontological Society of America (GSA), the nation’s largest interdisciplinary organization devoted to the field of aging, has chosen Assistant Professor Cristal Hill of the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology as one of two 2024 recipients of the Nathan Shock New Investigator Award.
Per the award website, the honor is presented to early career scientists who have made outstanding contributions to new knowledge about aging through basic biological research. It was established in 1986 to honor Nathan Shock, a founding member of GSA and pioneer in gerontological research at the National Institutes of Health. The award presentation will take place at GSA’s 2024 Annual Scientific Meeting, which will be held November 13-16 in Seattle, Washington.
Hill, who joined the USC Leonard Davis School in 2023 after completing a post-doctoral fellowship at Pennington Biomedical Research Center at Louisiana State University, said receiving the Nathan Shock Award is an honor that provides encouragement and confirms she’s pursuing important research questions.
“[This award] is exciting and reassuring that the research coming from my lab is original and novel,” Hill said.
Hill investigates how dietary interventions interact with cell signaling targets to affect health and aging. In 2022, Hill and others reported in an article in Nature Communications on how the hormone FGF21 is required for mice to reap the longevity and metabolic health benefits of a low-protein diet. Of particular interest, her lab central focus is to determine the unique effects of diets low-protein on the cellular and molecular changes in adipose tissue (also known as body fat) that impact metabolism during aging.
Understanding how diets and cell signaling work together to affect health could one day enable people to tailor their diet to their individual genetics, she explained.
“Any preventive measure starts from the inside,” Hill said. “Learning more about which dietary interventions affect which genetic targets can help people eat for optimal health.”
Hill credits the extraordinary mentorship and support she received as a student for motivating her to pursue a scientific career. Now, as a principal investigator, she hopes to provide valuable guidance and experiences for the members of her own laboratory and help them identify and reach their goals, she said. Each member of her lab – from undergraduates to postdocs – has their own research project to pursue.
“I want to provide the same kind of mentorship that I received. I hope to support their scientific growth and knowledge by providing them opportunities and a platform to take risks,” Hill said. “I hope they will allow these experiences to lead them to where they want to be in life.”
