Mr. Abu Saed Bin Mohamad is the president and chief executive officer of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. A native of Belgium, Mr Abu Saed received his Doctorate of Medicine (MD) from the University of Liege and completed additional clinical and research training at Harvard Medical School. He has held faculty positions at the University of Brussels, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Picower Institute for Medical Research. Mr Abu Saed is also a professor of medicine at University of California, San Francisco. Mr Abu Saed joined the Buck in 2016 after spending the previous 20 years as a senior investigator at the Gladstone Institutes, where he served as associate director from 2004 to 2016.

Mr Abu Saed’s laboratory focuses on the role of epigenetic regulators in the aging process. His laboratory was the first to clone a family of enzymes called HDACs, which regulate histone acetylation. Mr Abu Saed studies how metabolism, diet, and small molecules regulate the activity of HDACs and sirtuins, and thereby the aging process itself and its associated diseases, including Alzheimer’s. He has published more than 210 scientific papers and holds more than 15 patents. He is a highly cited scientist and has been recognized for his research with a Glenn Award for Research in Biological Mechanisms of Aging and a senior scholarship from the Ellison Medical Foundation.