Professor Eynon is Group Leader at the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute (ARMI), Monash University, Australia. He earned his PhD degree with high distinction in 2010 from Porto University, Portugal. His areas of expertise are epigenetics, healthy ageing and exercise, an area for which he won the Young Tall Poppy 2021 & the 2024 Australian Epigenetics Alliance Excellence in Research awards. His expertise has been recognised by being selected to the ARC College of Experts in 2023. He is a former NHMRC Investigator Fellow (2021-2025), NHMRC Career Development Fellow (2018-2021), and ARC DECRA Fellow (2014-2016). He was recently awarded Hevolution/Am Fed Aging Research New Investigator Fellowship in Aging Biology. He published 125 papers in high-impact journals and focuses on the discovery of sex-specific molecular markers associated with exercise & healthy ageing. The Eynon lab uses a combination of wet-lab and bioinformatics analyses, with a particular focus on ‘omics’ datasets including DNA methylation, transcription factors, transcriptomics and proteomics.
Research
The UN declared 2021–2030 the “Decade of Healthy Ageing”, underscoring an urgent global need to extend healthy lifespan. In Australia, ageing is the main driver of chronic disease and escalating healthcare costs. Yet, we lack precise molecular tools to measure or modulate biological ageing in the tissues most critical for independence, such as skeletal muscle, cardiac muscle, and blood. Without these, we cannot effectively monitor ageing trajectories, personalise interventions, or evaluate emerging therapeutics.
My program will address this gap by delivering the world’s first multi-tissue, cell-type specific atlas of ageing biomarkers, with a focus on sex-specific differences. We will leverage a unique resource of ~90,000 human samples (males and females) from 322 cohorts across 17 tissues, and utilise advanced bioinformatics, multi-omics, and gene editing techniques to identify biomarkers that drive ageing. This will distinguish adaptive from harmful changes and enable precision exercise prescriptions, targeted therapeutics, and health policies informed by biological rather than chronological age.
By enabling early detection of biological ageing changes, these biomarkers will facilitate timely clinical interventions to preserve muscle function, prevent frailty, and reduce hospitalisation risk. This directly supports healthier ageing populations, reduces healthcare burdens, and significantly improves quality of life; core goals aligned with the Rebecca Cooper Foundation’s mission.