About me
Currently
I am an Associate Professor in Bioinformatics at the Research Centre for Health & Life Sciences, Coventry University, UK. Since September 2024, my research has focused on the evolution and molecular basis of healthy ageing and longevity across a wide range of taxa, with a particular emphasis on mammals, including rodents, and eusocial organisms.
My fascination with ageing stems from studying species that defy conventional lifespan trade-offs. Eusocial animals such as ants, termites, bees, and even a few mammals such as naked mole-rats show remarkable longevity, often paired with exceptionally high reproductive output. These species represent natural experiments in how ageing and lifespan can evolve under radically different life-history regimes.
In eusocial organisms, reproductive individuals often live for decades while maintaining high fertility, effectively escaping or greatly delaying senescence. My work aims to dissect the genetic and regulatory mechanisms that allow for this “decoupling” of lifespan and reproduction and to compare how these mechanisms vary between social insects and mammals. By using comparative genomics, transcriptomics, epigenomics, and machine learning, I explore questions such as:
What genomic and regulatory features are consistently associated with long lifespan?
How do gene expression profiles related to ageing differ among long-lived mammals versus short-lived counterparts or eusocial queens?
Can we identify molecular signatures or biomarkers of longevity that are conserved across mammals, and which might inform our understanding of human ageing?
Mammalian Ageing and Longevity: Current and Future Directions
In recent work, I have begun exploring age-related gene expression profiles and promoter sequence features in long-lived and short-lived rodents. Pilot analyses suggest that certain promoter motifs and co-expression network patterns predict species-level differences in ageing trajectories.
Future studies will extend these pilot findings by integrating comparative transcriptomics from ageing mammalian tissues with machine learning approaches to predict lifespan and regulatory ageing markers.
I believe that comparative studies, whether in termites, ants, or long-lived rodents, provide a rich evolutionary perspective for understanding ageing. By identifying conserved mechanisms of healthy ageing, we can better frame questions relevant to human ageing and age-related disease. Ultimately, I hope that my work will contribute to discovering biomarkers and regulatory pathways that could be targeted for interventions to promote healthy ageing in humans.
Previously...
I grew up in Derby, in the East Midlands, UK, where I did my GCSEs at Sinfin Community School and A-levels in Chemistry, German and Maths at Wilmorton College. At the age of 19, I moved to Wuppertal in Germany, to first improve my German and then study Economics and Business Management - Wirtschaftswissenschaften. With this degree I worked as a strategic media consultant for MediaCom in Düsseldorf for 7 years. At MediaCom I was in charge of consulting for several brands for a large international company, while supervising several junior consultants.
But then...
At the age of 33 while visiting the natural history museum in London, I had an epiphany - it was there I realised, I should be working in biology. I went back to university and began my academic career in biology, first a BSc in Düsseldorf (2007-2010), followed by an MSc in Bochum (2010-2012). I then returned to the Midlands to pursue a PhD in evolutionary biology at the University of Leicester with Rob Hammond and Eamonn Mallon, investigating the effects of ploidy on selection. It is during this period that I developed my love and fascination for evolutionary biology, while developing important bioinformatics skills, such as R and Perl (later Python), as well as analytical experience in molecular evolution, population genomics and transcriptomics. After my PhD, I worked as a postdoc for 9 years within the group of Erich Bornberg-Bauer at the Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity, University of Münster, where I developed my fascination for the genomics of convergent evolutionary origins of eusociality and healthy ageing.
University of Münster
Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity
Molecular Evolution and Bioinformatics Group
https://bornberglab.org/people/harrison/
