Vyacheslav M. Labunskyy

Vyacheslav Labunskyy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Dermatology and has a joint appointment in the Department of Biochemistry at Boston University School of Medicine in Boston, Massachusetts. He is also an active member of the Boston University Genome Science Institute. Dr. Labunskyy’s training has been in redox biology, as a graduate student at the University of Nebraska, and basic biology of aging and systems biology at Harvard Medical School, where he pursued postdoctoral training.

As a post-doctoral fellow in Vadim Gladyshev’s lab at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, he focused on characterizing the role of translational regulation in aging using yeast as a model system. There he learned to apply ribosome profiling, an emerging high-throughput approach based on next-generation sequencing, which allows monitoring the rate of protein translation in vivo at the genome-wide level. Since establishing an independent lab in 2014, a unifying focus of Dr. Labunskyy’s research has been on studying the nature of senescent factors and understanding how stress response signaling regulates aging.

In his work he utilizes next-generation sequencing, comparative genomics, and a combination of novel computational and biochemical approaches to pursue quantitative analysis of the factors that lead to or accompany aging in eukaryotic cells. His research interests also involve synthetic biology and development of new bioengineering approaches that can be used to study complex traits, such as longevity, using yeast S. cerevisiae as a model organism.