Prof. Kan Cao received her B.Sc. degree in Biology from Nanjing University China in 1997 and her Ph.D. in Biology from Johns Hopkins University in 2005. She completed her postdoctoral fellowship in genomics at the National Institutes of Health between 2005 and 2010. She is a professor of Cell Biology and Molecular Genetics at the University of Maryland College Park. Dr. Cao was named the New Scholar in Aging by the Ellison Medical Foundation in 2011, received the Board of Visitors junior faculty award from the University of Maryland in 2013, and was the finalist for the Invention of the Year by the University of Maryland in 2016. In 2018, she received the Norma M. Allewell Prize in Entrepreneurship from the University of Maryland. Her research topics include Hutchinson Gilford progeria, telomere and cellular senescence, alternative splicing, and human aging.