February 03, 2015 | News

Congratulations!

On January 27, 2015, MPIDR-researcher Maarten Wensink has successfully defended his PhD thesis at the University of Leiden, Netherlands. In his dissertation, he evaluated current theories on the evolutionary basis of aging.

The notion that aging has an evolutionary basis is over a hundred years old. Yet, it appears that widely varying ideas exist about what this evolutionary basis consists in, but not all of these ideas are waterproof. In his thesis, Maarten Wensink evaluated current theories on the evolutionary basis of aging and he developed new ideas by means of thought experiments, mathematical models, and data analysis.

Maarten Wensink was a member of the former Max Planck Research Group Modeling the Evolution of Aging. His dissertation was jointly supervised by Annette Baudisch (MPIDR) and Rudi Westendorp, who is Professor of Medicine at Old Age at the University of Copenhagen.