Plenary Lecture Dr. Kenyon is a molecular biologist whose discovery with colleagues that a single-gene mutation could double the lifespan of the worm C. elegans sparked an intensive study of the molecular biology of aging. Her findings have since led to the discovery that an evolutionarily conserved hormone signaling system controls aging in other organisms as well, including mammals. As a doctoral student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she was the first to look for genes on the basis of their expression profiles, discovering that DNA damaging agents activate a battery of DNA repair genes in E. coli. She is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a past president of the Genetics Society of America.