Mapping the spatio-temporal metabolic atlas of aging and obesity
Description: Ageing and obesity are critical global health challenges, yet their influence on disease progression remains poorly understood. Paradoxically, ageing and obesity do not always accelerate diseases. For example, for some cancer types, obesity can accelerate cancer metastasis, but ageing decreases the metastasis occurrence, while for other tumour types ageing appears to promote their progression and obesity increases treatment response. Resolving these paradoxes requires comprehensive understanding of the molecular landscape of tissues across both space and time. This joint program establishes a multidisciplinary partnership, between the experimental expertise of KU Leuven and the analytical expertise of the University of Melbourne, to decode the molecular architecture of ageing and obesity. This joint program is built on an established and productive collaboration, which has already produced a submitted manuscript to a premier journal. The project is structured into two complementary tracks. At KU Leuven, the PhD candidate will leverage high-throughput multi-omics technologies to generate a high-resolution spatio-temporal molecular atlas of organ physiology during ageing and obesity, that will in a second step be linked to the response of cancer cells to these environments. Simultaneously, at the University of Melbourne, the PhD candidate will develop novel statistical and computational tools, stemming from established mixOmics and PhiSpace frameworks, to identify tissue subregions that respond differently to disease conditions. Through the synergy of the two research tracks, the two candidates will bridge the gap between biological data generation and statistical interpretation, producing broadly useful open-source software and a comprehensive biological atlas for the international research community.
Funder: Vlaamse regering
Funding type: fellowship
Funder scheme: BOF - doctoral mandates
Start date: 2026-10-01
End date: 2030-09-30
Investigators: Sarah-Maria Fendt, Xiaozheng Liu
Institution: KULeuven
Funded outputs count: 0
Funder award ID: GPUM/26/022
OpenAlex ID: G8990505885