Eric Verdin has a racing helmet to go with the executive title. In photographs from a visit with the filmmakers behind Live Beyond, the president of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging stands at a racetrack in racing gear. Before the conversation moved to the institute, there was karting. It is a pleasing way to meet a scientist whose professional life is usually introduced through appointments, publications and patents. The dress code suggests that the next item on the agenda may require both hands.
Verdin is Belgian-born, trained at Harvard after earning his degree in Liège, and has led the Buck since 2016. He is also a co-founder of Circulate Health. Those credentials describe a person accustomed to several kinds of responsibility. The track supplies a more immediate introduction: here is somebody who enjoys driving. There is no need to turn every hobby into a management theory. Still, a corner is a useful place to begin a story about a career that has repeatedly changed direction.
From Liège to the corner office
His formal education began in Belgium. Verdin earned his MD at the University of Liège and continued with clinical and research training at Harvard Medical School. Appointments at the University of Brussels, the National Institutes of Health and the Picower Institute followed. These were different institutions, with different colleagues and working cultures. Long before he ran an institute, his career had already taken him across an ocean and through several versions of scientific life.
Gladstone became a longer chapter. He joined in 1997 and served as associate director from 2004 to 2016. Alongside that work came a professorship at the University of California, San Francisco. The combination matters to the story of his later appointment: the Buck hired a working scientist who had also spent years with institutional responsibilities. He arrived with experience of both producing research and helping an organization operate around it.
On November 18, 2016, the Buck announced him as its permanent president and chief executive officer. In the same announcement, its trustees pledged $10 million. The money was intended to support faculty recruitment, laboratory infrastructure, equipment and scientific collaborations. A new leader and a financial commitment appeared together, making the appointment more tangible than a change on the office door.
In pledged gifts from Buck trustees, announced alongside Verdin’s arrival. Support for people, laboratories and collaborations.
There is a whole executive job hidden in that list. Recruiting someone means finding the resources for their work. Equipment needs buying, maintaining and replacing. Collaborations require people with time to collaborate. The announcement placed those practical needs beside its ambitions. Verdin was taking responsibility for the conditions under which other scientists would work, as well as continuing to pursue questions of his own.
The people who make an institute
One example comes through David Furman. Verdin took an interest in his research and suggested that he apply to the Buck. Furman was initially unconvinced. A visit changed his view: the conversations and collaborative environment appealed to him. The episode gives recruitment a human scale. An institutional strategy can begin with one scientist noticing another scientist’s work and making an invitation.
Furman went on to describe the appeal of encountering people approaching related questions from different perspectives. For a leader, that is an encouraging account of a place to work. It also makes a useful distinction between assembling a roster and building a community. The researchers must have reasons to talk to one another after the hiring announcement has disappeared from view.
Verdin has spoken warmly about the Buck’s appetite for disruption. In 2019, he called that attitude a “badge of honor.” The remark carries some of the pleasure he takes in the institution. He was describing colleagues who want to challenge established approaches, and a workplace where that inclination is welcome. A badge is inexpensive. Supporting the person wearing it is the ongoing commitment.
“The kind of people we attract see disruption as a badge of honor.”
Eric Verdin · 2019
The setting has its own character. The Buck’s Novato campus, completed in 1999, was designed by I. M. Pei. Its architecture gives the organization a recognizable home on a Marin County hillside. A beautiful building can help introduce an institute to visitors. What happens inside depends on less photogenic arrangements: appointments, budgets, support staff and the willingness of colleagues to exchange ideas.
Papers have company
Verdin’s own record includes both publications and inventions. His record includes more than 270 scientific papers and more than 18 patents. Those conservative lower bounds offer a sense of the volume of his work. They nevertheless describe two established parts of his career: contributing to the published record and developing work that can be protected as intellectual property.
Published work and inventions · cumulative lower bounds.
Company formation adds another part. He founded Acylin, which was purchased by AbbVie, and has served on scientific advisory boards including those of Elixir, Sirtris, Calico and Nokia. He has also advised Sofinnova Ventures. The affiliations stretch across companies with different histories and scales. Taken together, they show a scientist repeatedly asked to bring his judgment into commercial settings.
Circulate needs a little grammatical care. Its team page lists Brad Younggren as co-founder and CEO. Verdin is a co-founder, with his CEO title attached to the Buck Institute. Read too quickly, the adjacent titles could put him in charge of the wrong organization. Read carefully, they describe two colleagues with distinct executive roles. The distinction is small on the page and substantial in practice.
That combination of positions helps explain the breadth of his public biography. He can appear as a laboratory head, a professor, an institute executive or a company co-founder. Each title records a particular relationship. None quite contains the whole career. The interesting story lies in following the work between those settings, where a scientific question may acquire new collaborators, new resources and a different set of deadlines.
The work of being heard
His professional recognition includes a Glenn Award and a senior scholarship from the Ellison Medical Foundation. He is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the Association of American Physicians. Such distinctions give a biography its formal scaffolding. They also place him within networks of researchers beyond the institution he leads.
In April 2019, he joined a president’s advisory council at the National Academy of Medicine. The initiative brought together academic colleagues and people from business, philanthropy, entertainment and culture. It was an explicitly international undertaking. The appointment extended his work into a group whose membership reached beyond laboratory science, with the practical challenge of bringing different kinds of expertise into the same conversation.
On February 12, 2025, he appeared before the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging. The witness list identified him as the Buck’s president and CEO, alongside Rhonda Patrick, Sarah Nosal and Dan Buettner. Whatever the subject of a particular hearing, the act of appearing has an institutional meaning: an executive is there to make a body of work understandable to people who make public decisions. Scientific authority must be expressed in language that can leave the laboratory.
A wider turn in 2026
The latest chapter includes new colleagues. In August 2026, the Buck appointed Lisa Seitz Gruwell as chief advancement officer, responsible for philanthropy, communications and marketing. She came after 15 years at Wikipedia, bringing experience with fundraising and community building. Verdin’s welcome emphasized those skills and the institute’s fundraising goals. It was a revealing appointment for an organization whose work depends on both financial support and public understanding.
The year also brought a partnership with Fennec Engineering to explore safety infrastructure for biological AI. Buck faculty member James Yurkovich is spearheading that effort. The collaboration connects research with engineering approaches used for autonomous systems. Keeping the individual leader of the project in view matters: the institute’s activity is the work of many people, even when its chief executive is the most familiar name on the letterhead.
On October 16, Attilio announced Verdin as co-chairman. Its inaugural event, scheduled for October 29 and 30 at Stanford University and the Buck, also listed Laura Carstensen, Robert Waldinger and Dean Ornish. The appointment adds another organization to his working life. As of this profile’s publication, the event remains ahead of him, another date on a calendar already shared among research, leadership and public appearances.
Room for the experiment
Verdin has described an ambition for an institute modeled on Google X: identify talented researchers, give them resources and allow them to pursue work with a substantial chance of failure. It is a proposal about how science is organized. The emphasis falls on the people entrusted with the opportunity, and on accepting that an ambitious experiment may yield very little before another one produces something useful.
There is an appealing tension here. Leading an institution requires attention to resources; making discoveries requires accepting uncertainty about what those resources will produce. His career has placed him on both sides of that problem. He continues to run a laboratory while carrying the executive title. He also continues to race. The helmet gives the biography a welcome piece of ordinary enthusiasm, something to put on before the next turn.