Jordan Weiss, Assistant Professor, NYU Grossman School of Medicine

Jordan Weiss was the kind of college kid who tried to move into a retirement community because he liked the vibe, undeterred by the fact that it was for elders. (They didn’t accept his application.) He began college as a screenwriting major and did stand-up comedy on the side. Then, romanticized by math and economics, he ended up in finance.

The fit was bad. “I started to experience a lot of stress, which I had never really had before,” he says, “so I became very interested in stress and health, and I took a research position at UC San Francisco’s Fitness, Aging and Stress Lab, where I studied the cellular effects of stress.”

Soon, he was researching cognitive health and aging processes, which led him to an interest in population aging and health more broadly. That led to an interest in health economics and cost effectiveness, and so he did a Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in Demography. “I developed a microsimulation model to forecast the burden of dementia in the United States through the year 2050. And over the course of my graduate studies I also became very interested in target trial emulation.”

Now, just after completing a two-year fellowship at the Stanford Center on Longevity, Weiss is 34 and has been appointed assistant professor in the Division of Precision Medicine and the Optimal Aging Institute at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine. At Stanford, he worked with social epidemiologist David Rehkopf, an expert in population health whose research shows that where we live is one of the strongest influences on how long we live.

These days, Weiss’s work is organized around the question of why some people stay healthy as they age while others don’t. “It’s a broad range of topics, from estimating the lifetime risk of dementia to understanding the economics of healthspan extension,” he says. “I’m also involved in the Dog Aging Project, where we investigate the determinants of health and lifespan in dogs, aiming to identify strategies to extend both.”

As Weiss observes, there’s a lot of research these days into how to extend lifespan, but Weiss says he’s far more interested in how we extend the number of years spent in good health. “I’m working to close the gap between years spent in good health versus years spent alive,” he says. And he’s also studying how social inequalities play a role in that gap. In that context, he’s sensitive to the importance of how we define a healthy life span, and is concerned about the potential for discounting the experiences of historically marginalized populations.

He also worked on developing methods for drug repurposing during a fellowship at UC Berkeley, and is pursuing a line of work using target trial emulation. This approach uses electronic health records to simulate hypothetical randomized trials, applying causal inference methods and machine learning. “In an ideal research setting, we could randomize individuals to specific exposures and observe the causal effects,” he explains. “But, it is neither feasible nor ethical to randomize someone into, say, hearing loss—hard to get volunteers for that one! Thankfully, causal inference and machine learning allow us to emulate these trials and inform individualized prediction and treatment strategies to optimize health and aging processes.”

Toward that end, he’s eager to translate his work into tools for consumers and clinicians. Some of what’s being learned is already being applied within NYU’s healthcare system, he says. Outside of that, he serves on the advisory board of Bevel Health, a health tech company whose app offers continuous monitoring and personalized recommendations, helping users to make informed daily decisions to improve their health and well-being.

Looking at his career trajectory, you can see the kind of inventive, engaging mind he has. His curiosity is wide-ranging, eclectic, and he makes unexpected connections. On any given day, his work spans a range of projects, from health economics and software development to analyzing patterns of aging (among humans and dogs) and identifying targeted treatment strategies for non-communicable diseases (mostly among humans). It was during his two years at Stanford that all those interests came together for him under the umbrella of longevity.

The bottom line, he says, is that “I’m interested in how experiences over the life course shape trajectories of health and aging. At Stanford, I was encouraged to explore these varied interests within the context of longevity which broadened my scope of thinking.”

But perhaps the biggest source of inspiration is closer to home. When Weiss, who grew up in San Francisco, returned for his work at UC San Francisco in 2013, he found housing right across the street from his grandmother—now 100 years old. “We would go swimming at the JCC and walk around Golden Gate Park, and she’d always complain that I drove too slow.” He spent a lot of time with her and her friends, developing a deep appreciation for the diversity of experiences among older adults. This fueled his curiosity to study the aging process and explore ways to help people age optimally through personalized, targeted interventions.