Eshan Mehra

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.