Joe Baur is a Professor in the Department of Physiology and the Institute for Diabetes, Obesity, and Metabolism at Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, as well as Director of the Rodent Metabolic Phenotyping Core. His long-term interest is in the basic mechanisms that lead to aging, which is a critical risk factor for the major causes of morbidity and mortality in the western world, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, and neurodegenerative disorders. The Baur lab is currently focused on the use of small molecules to understand and mimic the health-promoting effects of dietary manipulations in rodents, with a particular focus on nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+) metabolism. He grew up near Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, and attended Acadia University before moving to UT Southwestern in Dallas, Texas, to pursue his PhD studies on human telomere biology. For his postdoctoral studies, he moved to Harvard Medical School to study sirtuin enzymes, which use NAD+ to alter post-translational modifications and have been hypothesized to play a role in aging. He opened his own lab at Penn at the end of 2008, where he has explored the role of NAD+ in cellular metabolism beyond sirtuins.