Dr. Rozalyn Anderson is a Vilas Distinguished Professor in the Department of Medicine in the Division of Geriatrics and Gerontology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. Dr. Anderson is Director of the NIH/NIA sponsored Wisconsin Nathan Shock Center of Excellence in the Basic Biology of Aging (WiNSC), Director of the Metabolism of Aging program, Director of the Biology of Aging and Age-Related Diseases T32 training program, and Associate Director of Research in the Geriatric Research, Education, and Clinical Center at the William S Middleton Memorial Veterans Hospital.

She is a Fellow and former Chair of the Biological Sciences section of the Gerontological Society of America and a Fellow and former President of the American Aging Association. She a recipient of the Nathan Shock New Investigator Award (GSA), the Biological Mechanisms in Aging Award (Glenn Foundation), the Breakthroughs in Gerontology Award (AFAR), and the Denham Harman Award (American Aging Association).

Dr. Anderson’s group recently published the following manuscript:

Clark JP, Rhoads TW, McIlwain SJ, Polewski MA, Pavelec DM, Colman RJ, Anderson RM. Caloric Restriction Reprograms Adipose Tissues in Rhesus Monkeys. Aging Cell. 2025 Dec;24(12):e70254. doi: 10.1111/acel.70254. Epub 2025 Oct 3. PMID: 41042069; PMCID: PMC12686577.

Notes/Summary: Dr. Anderson is leading a nonhuman primate study of aging and delayed aging by caloric restriction in nonhuman primates (rhesus monkeys). The overall goal is to discover molecular details of the aging process and identify the impact of caloric restriction in changing these patterns. The idea is that pathways and processes involved disease vulnerability will appear in the normal aging animals but not in the caloric restriction animals and could serve as targets for pharmacological intervention. In this paper, the Anderson team focused on adipose tissue and asked what caloric restriction does to adipose tissue and whether the location of the adipose (visceral or subcutaneous) made a difference in the impact of caloric restriction. The team showed that caloric restriction lowered inflammation and boosted metabolism and although the effect was conserved between the adipose depots, the details in that response were depot specific. The team went on to show that differences in the molecular signatures of subcutaneous and visceral adipose were conserved between monkeys and humans. Importantly, the response to caloric restriction in subcutaneous adipose tissue was highly similar between these monkeys and the samples from humans that participated in the CALERIE study. The team brings us one step close to discovering how caloric restriction works and suggests that the lessons learned in rhesus monkey aging are likely to be highly relevant to human aging and health.