Founders
In addition to establishing itself as a recognized leader in its field, SENS Foundation is committed to ensuring mature operational and financial management from the day of its launch, and has put together a senior management team to reflect that commitment.
Chief Executive Officer, SENS Foundation
Mr. Kope received his J.D. from the University of Michigan in 1990. He has served as the University of Michigan’s Intellectual Property Counsel; as Director of Corporate Development for Aviron, and for MedImmune, Inc.; and as CEO and officer of a number of start-ups in the biotechnology space. He specializes in business development and consulting, and is widely experienced with biotechnology organizations. Mike has negotiated a broad range of business acquisition and partnership agreements, designed strategies for technology protection and promotion in many fields of research, and facilitated a number of successful startups.
Chief Science Officer, SENS Foundation
Dr. Aubrey de Grey is a biomedical gerontologist based in Cambridge, UK, and is the Chief Science Officer of SENS Foundation, a California-based 501(c)(3) charity dedicated to combating the aging process. He is also Editor-in-Chief of Rejuvenation Research, the world’s highest-impact peer-reviewed journal focused on intervention in aging. He received his BA and Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 1985 and 2000 respectively. His original field was computer science, and he did research in the private sector for six years in the area of software verification before switching to biogerontology in the mid-1990s. His research interests encompass the characterisation of all the accumulating and eventually pathogenic molecular and cellular side-effects of metabolism (“damage”) that constitute mammalian aging and the design of interventions to repair and/or obviate that damage. He has developed a possibly comprehensive plan for such repair, termed Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS), which breaks aging down into seven major classes of damage and identifies detailed approaches to addressing each one. Dr. de Grey is a Fellow of both the Gerontological Society of America and the American Aging Association, and sits on the editorial and scientific advisory boards of numerous journals and organisations.
Dr. de Grey's full CV is available here.
Dr. de Grey's full CV is available here.
Co-founder, SENS Foundation
Sarah is a co-founder of SENS Foundation, and acted as its Executive Vice President until September, 2011. She was previously employed as COO of the UK political think-tank, Demos, with responsibilities including financial management and accounting, HR, business infrastructure, and strategic development. She also co-authored a global survey of design practices in public sector service delivery, working with a team from PriceWaterhouseCoopers. In the 1990s she spent several years as a business and IT consultant with Andersen Consulting (now Accenture), working on a variety of projects from systems analysis to the streamlining of the new business acquisition procedures for the company's EMEAI operations. She has a Bachelor's Degree in Law, from the University of Oxford, and another in Theoretical Physics, from Imperial College London, where she also built a prototype web portal for the European grid computing network of the Large Hadron Collider. Her postgraduate studies include a Master's Degree in Social Anthropology from the University of Manchester, specializing in the nature of cultural misappropriation in Western subcultures, and a PhD in Theoretical Physics from Imperial College London, covering the quantum and relativistic properties of black holes in discrete spacetimes.
Treasurer, Board Member
Kevin Perrott is the owner of Riverside Honda, the largest Honda recreational vehicle dealership in Canada. After twenty years of management he became a cancer survivor and shifted direction to academics to develop methods of curing cancer and other age-related diseases. He graduated from the University of Alberta in 2006 at the age of 43 with a double major in Biology and Chemistry. He then entered the PhD program and after completing two years studying the role of mitochondria in the process of aging in the nematode C. elegans, he shifted focus to the importance of the phenomenon of mammalian cellular senescence and its role in degenerative disease. Kevin is a consultant for the Biomedical Engineering Research and Results Initiative (BERRI) at the University of Alberta pursuing the construction of collaborations to accelerate the development of therapies able to restore function in aged individuals. In 2005 he became COO and a Board Member of the Methuselah Foundation, and Executive Director of the Methuselah Mouse Prize. He is also the Founder and CEO of AgeNet (Aging Research Network), a charity sponsoring research to maintain and restore function lost to degenerative disease. In the fall of 2008, AgeNet helped in founding the LifeStar Institute, an U.S. charity dedicated to raising awareness of the economic and social impact of of global aging, as well as founding SENS Foundation. Mr. Perrott continues to support the advance of aging research as the VP of the American Aging Association and through his research at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging.
Co-Founder
Jeff gained his Bachelor's Degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan, and has over twenty years of engineering and management experience. Over the past sixteen years he has been involved in entrepreneurial ventures, including three years in Silicon Valley, developing a web portal business and working with venture capitalists. His engineering qualification has been supplemented by two years of philosophy studies with an emphasis on AI research, again at the University of Michigan, in addition to more recent, in-depth involvement with molecular biology and biogerontology. Jeff is the founder and Chief Engineer of Muse Technologies, an engineering consulting and systems integration company based in Ann Arbor, MI, which is currently engaged in an NIH-funded research project with the University of Michigan. He is the Chief Engineer of Halcyon Molecular, and has also worked as a research engineer, supporting the ATLAS upgrade to the CERN Accelerator, and as Program Manager for Virtio, a startup company developing simulation software for embedded systems. Since 2005 Jeff worked with the Methuselah Foundation, most recently as Executive Director of SENS.