👋🏻 Welcome, I'm Justin! 😄

  I study how what animals smell and taste changes how they age.

My doctoral work at Rutgers uses Drosophila to ask a question that lies beneath much of aging biology: how much of the tradeoff between reproduction and lifespan is driven by nutrients themselves, and how much is driven by the nervous system's read of what food is nearby. It turns out sensory cues alone can influence reproductive investment, and not always in the direction classical resource-allocation models predict. I work across behavior, genetics, optogenetics, connectomics, and transcriptomics to pull that apart.

Before Rutgers, I worked on commensal bacteria and insulin-like signaling in Drosophila aging at Lancaster, and on asthma genetics at Queen's University Belfast.

Growing up in Malaysia, I watched what aging costs a family. Caring for my grandmother ran higher than an average household's annual income, which taught me early that a comfortable death is a privilege, not a default. That is the reason I work on healthspan rather than lifespan alone.

I also spend real time on the parts of science that are not experiments: facilitating the Southeast Asian Graduate Affinity Group at Rutgers, mentoring undergraduate and high school researchers, and teaching introductory biology.