Eshan Mehra

Harvard University — A.B., Chemistry, Physics, and Human Developmental & Regenerative Biology (Expected May 2027)

🤙🏽 About Me

I am interested in the problem of capacity: how it is built, how it erodes, and whether it can be restored.

Most modern medicine intervenes after failure becomes known. I am more interested in the upstream, the regulatory layers that translate environment, stress, and time into cell fate and trajectory. Much of decline is not simply damage accumulating but programmable cell states drifting off course over time and as we age.

Age-associated decline is part of our evolutionary inheritance, a consequence of selection optimizing for reproduction rather than long-term maintenance. But this does not imply that the erosion of our ability to experience love, joy, purpose, and connection long before death must be accepted as inevitable.

My focus then is on building and applying next-generation omics tools to make these dysregulated cell states legible. Measurement precedes mechanism. Mechanism precedes control. Without tools, prevention is philosophy. With them, it becomes engineering.

I work where tool-building meets aging biology because that is where leverage lives, upstream, treating loss of capacity before death as an engineering problem to be understood, not a fate to be accepted.

🔬 Laboratories

Buenrostro Lab

Advised by Dr. Jason Buenrostro and Dr. Patrick Griffin, I am developing next-generation single-cell omics tools to study regulatory mechanisms governing immune cell states and fates in aging.

Synthetic Immunity Lab

Advised by Dr. Ming-Ru Wu, I engineered T-cells with logic-gated induction of an immortalized “zombie T-cell” (zT-cell) state to overcome exhaustion in vivo.

Gao Lab

Advised by Dr. Ruli Gao, I analyzed Nanopore scRNA-seq data of patient-matched renal cell carcinomas and brain metastases to map gene expression dynamics in brain-metastasis evolution for target identification.

📚 Experience

TIME Initiative

Selected as 1 of 25 fellows supported by the Academy for Health & Lifespan Research; represent early-career scientists in aging biology at international conferences; direct and host TIME Cast, interviewing leaders in aging biology, biotechnology, and policy.

Nexus Fellowship

Advance translational efforts in age-related disease by drafting policy memos, leading interdisciplinary journal clubs, and designing, scoping, and securing funding for high-impact experimental programs at the interface of academia, biotechnology, and policy.

Future of Aging Summit

Co-founded and co-hosted an interdisciplinary summit on aging at the 2025 Gerontological Society of America (GSA) Annual Meeting, convening 100+ attendees across academia, industry, and policy; led and moderated discussions on clinical research in aging and biotechnology’s role in age-related disease translation.

Aging Initiative at Harvard

Co-managed Boston’s largest aging-biology mixer (Nov 2024) featuring George Church, Alex Colville, and Jesse Poganik; jointly hosted the Muscle Aging Science and Translation (MAST) Symposium (April 2024); co-lead a 27-member team, manage partnerships and advisors, and raised $10,000+ through industry outreach.

GAMI

Co-led development of a nurse–patient matching mobile platform for elderly patients in India with Udaya Kumar and ISER Tirupati partners; led needs-mapping of healthcare delivery bottlenecks, coordinated cross-institutional development, and spearheaded pilot implementation planning.

Nucleate Aging Biology

Co-managed a global thematic series focused on aging biology and longevity biotechnology; organized and moderated panels with founders and venture capital leaders in longevity biotech, and co-authored accompanying resource guides synthesizing technical and translational insights.

Harvard OpenBio

Co-founded and jointly chaired Harvard OpenBio’s Biosecurity Team; organized biosecurity journal clubs and speaker series; co-hosted the Future of Biology Conference (130+ attendees; keynote speakers including George Church and Reshma Shetty); co-led the Harvard Summer Research Institute, matching 73 underserved students nationwide to research mentors and publishing their abstracts.

🏅 Honors and Awards

TIME x Aoki Foundation Grant Recipient (2026)
TIME Initiative; Aoki Foundation
Grant support to organize and host the Immune Aging Speaker Series.

TIME x age1 Exploration Grant Recipient (2025)
age1 Venture Capital; TIME Initiative
Selected to represent next-generation aging biology leaders at ARDD 2025.

Herchel-Smith Fellow (2025)
Herchel Smith Fund

John Harvard Scholar (2025)
Dean of Harvard College (top 5% of class)

Program for Research in Science & Engineering (PRISE) Fellow (2024)
Harvard Office of Undergraduate Research & Fellowships

Harvard College Research Program Grant Recipient (2024)
Harvard Office of Undergraduate Research & Fellowships (twice awarded)

1st Place Poster Presentation Award (2023)
Beckman Institute of Advanced Science and Technology; ResearcHStart

Jessie Chambers Scholarship (2023)
National Junior Classical League (1 of 8 recipients)

National Latin Exam Scholarship (2023)
NLE Scholarship Committee (1 of 12 recipients)

Congressional Award, Bronze Medal (2022)
United States Congress

📝 Publications and Presentations

Abstracts

  • Fedorovskyy, M., Dasariraju, S., Simonini, S., Mehra, E., Law, C., Khera, N., Rajagopal, K., & Orkaby, A. (2025). Aging initiative: A student-led model for advancing aging research with a translational focus. Innovation in Aging. (doi: 10.1093/geroni/igaf122.3536)
  • Chan, K., Wang, J., Balakumar, A., Ng, M., Mehra, E., Jain, L., Fischetti, C., Foody, J. N., Duggan, N. M., Goldsmith, A. J., & Allan-Blitz, L.-T. (2025). Using machine learning to classify manifestations of extrapulmonary tuberculosis with point-of-care ultrasound: A proof of concept. The Ultrasound Journal. Manuscript under review.

Presentations

  • Mehra, E., Lu, L., Lin, H.-Y., Shiau, C.-K., Pan, T., & Gao, R. (2023). Studying cell fate trajectories of renal cell carcinomas in brain metastasis. Poster presentation. Lurie Cancer Research Center, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, IL; Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
  • Emani, V., An, D., Mehra, E. (2025). A digital platform to improve access & affordability of trained homecare medical nurses in India. Poster presentation. Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.

Essays

  • Mehra, E. (2025). How the power shift in healthcare from providers to insurers is eroding physician-patient relationships. Harvard Undergraduate Health Policy Review. Link

🧪 Projects

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