Our Team

Youngjoon Bae, PhD, is an Associate Research Scientist with the Aiello Research Group at the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. His research examines how social and behavioral factors shape biological aging and cognitive health, with particular interests in immune system aging, epigenetic aging, and neurodegeneration. His work also explores how social interventions, including unconditional cash transfers, influence cognitive function. Dr. Bae earned his PhD in Sociology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and previously served as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center on Aging and Population Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin.

Kamaryn Tanner joined the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center in 2023 and the Aiello Research Group in 2025. She works with large longitudinal and cross-sectional cohort datasets to study biological aging, inflammaging, and persistent infections. Dr Tanner has expertise in clinical prediction models, survival analysis, mediation analysis, conducting simulation studies and application of novel statistical methods. She holds a PhD in biostatistics from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Prior to completing her PhD, she held senior quantitative, analytics development and product management roles at software firms serving banks, broker-dealers and wealth management firms.

Rawan Ajeen joined the Aiello Research Group in 2026. Her research focuses on how biological, behavioral, and social factors interact to shape cardiometabolic health and aging across the life course. Her work integrates epidemiologic and clinical intervention approaches to study chronic disease and health disparities. She has examined population-specific anthropometric thresholds for obesity and cardiometabolic disease using data from the Qatar Biobank and investigated how food insecurity and socioeconomic conditions influence long-term health in diverse populations, including work in Yemen and the Cebu Longitudinal Health and Nutrition Survey. She has also contributed to a clinical trial in North Carolina addressing food insecurity, reflecting her interest in translating population-level findings into real-world interventions. She earned her PhD in Nutrition from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Aanya Bahl is a PhD student in Epidemiology at Columbia University. At ARG, Aanya's research is centered on plasma biomarkers of neurodegeneration and biological aging in Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias. Specifically, she is interested in unearthing how immune aging and neurodegenerative risk is shaped across the life course. Aanya also works on projects related to women’s aging; she is especially curious about reproductive aging and the healthy aging of women throughout the life course. 

Arjun is a second-year MPA student at Columbia University, concentrating in Technology Policy, and a Graduate Research Assistant with the Aiello Research Group. At the ARG Lab, he develops voice AI tools for automated cognitive assessment. His research focuses on AI safety and alignment, specifically chain-of-thought monitoring and reasoning verification. He studies whether a model's stated reasoning faithfully reflects its underlying computation, and where monitors and verifiers fail under distribution shift and optimization pressure. He also co-founded ImpactAI Foundry, which works with nonprofits to build safe, practical AI tools for social impact. More at: https://www.arjunbalaji.in/

Jennifer Momkus, MPH, PhD is an epidemiologist and was a postdoctoral research scientist at the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center. She works extensively with data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) to investigate early-life and midlife determinants of aging-related outcomes. Her research focuses on the biosocial mechanisms linking life course exposures to outcomes such as biological aging, immunosenescence, and cognitive function. Her work integrates biomarker, epigenetic, and population-based approaches to understand how social and biological processes jointly shape trajectories of aging and risk for age-related outcomes such as Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias.

Denis earned an M.S. in Data Science from Columbia University in 2024. He worked with Dr. Aiello to develop voice audio recognition machine learning models and LLM-powered AI agents, which are designed to retrieve and synthesize public health data from research databases, enhancing information retrieval efficiency and reducing search times.