Daniel Belsky Recognized as a 2026 Fierce 50 Honoree

Daniel Belsky, PhD, associate professor of Epidemiology at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health in the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center, has been named a 2026 Fierce 50 honoree by the editors of Fierce Pharma, Fierce Biotech, and Fierce Healthcare. The Fierce 50 recognizes 50 individuals and organizations driving advancements in medicine, fostering innovation and shaping the future of biopharma and healthcare.

“This year’s Fierce 50 honorees reflect the breadth of talent and vision shaping the biopharma and healthcare industries today,” said Ayla Ellison, editor-in-chief of Fierce Life Sciences and Healthcare. “Each has made a distinct contribution, whether by advancing scientific discovery, improving the health of communities, expanding access to care, or reimagining how healthcare is delivered at a local level or on a global scale.

At the Butler Columbia Aging Center, Belsky directs the Center’s Geroscience Computational Core, where he and his team of researchers develop methods to quantify the pace and progress of biological aging in young, midlife, and older adult humans and apply these methods in epidemiological studies and clinical trials to identify opportunities for intervention to increase healthy lifespan. 

Belsky and his collaborators developed DunedinPoAm, a blood test designed to measure a person’s “pace of aging,” or how quickly they are progressing toward age-related disease at a given moment. The tool was later refined into DunedinPACE of Aging method and the DunedinPACE epigenetic clock after incorporating follow-up data through age 45 and more rigorously curating epigenetic data.

Recognized as a leader in his field, Belsky has received numerous awards in aging research and has been named an ISI highly-cited researcher.  His work is supported by the U.S. National Institute on Aging, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and the American Federation for Aging Research (AFAR), among other sources. 

According to Belsky, geroscience must be integrated with the social and behavioral sciences to develop the best approaches to healthy human aging. As he sees it, aging science should ensure “that we are focusing our efforts on building therapeutic technologies that have the widest possible scope of implementation.” “We’re no longer in the business of treating a targeted population; we’re talking about everyone,” he said. 

“We have these complex social lives; we live in complex dynamic environments,” Belsky said. “Failure to understand the ways those environments structure our aging process is inevitably going to impair the effectiveness of whatever intervention we design.”

Looking ahead to the next decade, Belsky told the editors of the FIERCE 50 he is hopeful the field will shift from biomarker development to practical implementation, including evaluating how biomarkers can be embedded in healthcare systems, large-scale population surveillance, and clinical medicine to systematically extend healthy lifespans for everyone.