Ana Maria Cuervo

Ana Maria Cuervo, M.D., Ph.D., is a Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Developmental & Molecular Biology and Medicine (Hepatology) at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. She holds the Robert and Renée Belfer Chair for the Study of Neurodegenerative Diseases and serves as co-director of the Einstein Institute for Aging Research. She is affiliated with the Einstein Liver Research Center and Cancer Center. Her research focuses on the molecular mechanisms of autophagy dysfunction in aging and its role in neurodegeneration, metabolic disorders, and cancer. Dr. Cuervo’s work has demonstrated how restoring autophagy can prevent protein accumulation in aging and revealed links between autophagy and metabolism.

She has received numerous honors, including membership in the National Academy of Sciences (2019), American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2018), and Royal Academies of Medicine. Her research has been presented in prestigious lectures and she chairs international scientific committees. Dr. Cuervo’s lab pioneered studies on autophagy’s role in diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, and she advocates for translational applications of autophagy research in clinical settings.

Her contributions include over 200 publications, with key work on chaperone-mediated autophagy (CMA) mechanisms, the role of CMA in tumor growth, and its regulation by metabolic pathways. She has organized major conferences and serves on editorial boards, including as co-editor-in-chief of Aging Cell.