UC San Diego Bioengineer Wins $160,000 AFAR Award to Decode the Postmenopausal Vaginal Microbiome

The American Federation for Aging Research has named Erika Cyphert, PhD, an Assistant Professor in the Shu Chien-Gene Lay Bioengineering Department at the University of California San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering, as the recipient of the 2026 Sagol Network GerOmic Award for Junior Faculty. The announcement, made in New York, recognizes Cyphert’s project titled “Uncovering how reproductive aging influences host-microbe metabolic interactions,” a systems-level investigation into how the microbial communities of the vagina change in structure and function after menopause. The honor places her among a small cohort of early-career scientists chosen each year to apply the tools of large-scale biology to one of the most complex problems in modern biomedicine: the biology of aging.

The Sagol Network GerOmic Award for Junior Faculty was established in 2020 as a partnership between AFAR and the Sagol Network, a philanthropic organization founded by the Sagol Family to advance research in neuroscience and healthy lifespan. The award provides between $160,000 over one to two years to junior faculty holding MDs or PhDs, with the explicit goal of supporting aging-related omics research, a field AFAR has branded as GerOmics. Rather than funding a single gene or protein study, the award is designed to back investigations that read biology at scale, using comprehensive molecular datasets to understand how the aging organism changes as an integrated system.

Omics, the technological foundation of Cyphert’s funded work, refers to a family of disciplines that include genomics, epigenomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics. What unites them is a shared ambition: instead of examining one molecule at a time, these approaches use advanced instrumentation and computational analysis to measure entire collections of biological molecules simultaneously, whether DNA, RNA, proteins, or metabolites. The result is a view of biology that is global rather than piecemeal, allowing researchers to detect patterns, networks, and interactions that would be invisible to any single-molecule experiment. For aging research, this perspective is especially valuable, because aging is not a single pathway but a heterogeneous, system-wide process in which dozens of molecular changes accumulate and interact over decades.

Given that complexity and heterogeneity, omics research has become an increasingly important lens on both the aging process itself and the many chronic diseases that accompany it. Geroscience, the interdisciplinary field that seeks to understand how the biology of aging drives age-related disease, depends on exactly this kind of comprehensive molecular measurement. By quantifying the full complement of metabolites or microbial genes in a tissue, researchers can begin to distinguish the molecular signatures of healthy aging from those of pathology, and identify intervention points where modifying a basic cellular process might delay or prevent multiple chronic conditions at once. It is this logic that AFAR’s GerOmic program is built to accelerate.

Cyphert’s project targets a stage of life that has long been scientifically neglected. Menopause is a normal part of aging, yet it remains an understudied aspect of human biology, even though for many women it can occupy as much as one third of the lifespan. The hormonal transition that defines menopause reshapes tissues, immune responses, and metabolic environments throughout the body, and the vaginal microbiome is no exception. The communities of bacteria and other microbes that inhabit the vaginal environment are closely tied to host health, and the hormonal shifts of reproductive aging alter the metabolic conditions those microbes depend on, potentially reshaping which species thrive and what metabolic functions they perform.

That gap in knowledge has direct clinical consequences. Healthcare providers currently assess vaginal health using reference information drawn mostly from women who have not yet gone through menopause. As a result, when a postmenopausal woman presents with symptoms or test results, it can be difficult for clinicians to determine whether she has a genuine vaginal health problem or whether her body is simply undergoing the normal, healthy changes that accompany aging. The absence of age-appropriate benchmarks means that normal postmenopausal biology can be mistaken for disease, and conversely, that genuine conditions may be dismissed as expected changes. Establishing what a healthy vaginal microbiome actually looks like in postmenopausal women is therefore a prerequisite for accurate diagnosis and effective treatment in this population.

To close that gap, Cyphert’s lab will characterize which microbes are found in the vagina after menopause and, critically, how they function. The project brings together a multidisciplinary team of bioengineers, clinicians, and physician-scientists to develop novel imaging and microbial sequencing modalities capable of resolving both the spatial organization of microbial communities and their metabolic activity. The approach is deliberately systems-level: cutting-edge imaging is combined with omics datasets, including metabolomics and metagenomics, to identify the specific microbes and metabolites associated with different states of vaginal health across menopause status. Metagenomics reveals which organisms are present and what genetic capabilities they carry, while metabolomics captures the small molecules those organisms and their host exchange, together providing a functional picture rather than a simple species census.

The long-term aim of the work is to establish clearer, evidence-based guidelines for what a healthy or unhealthy vaginal microbiome looks like in postmenopausal women, and to identify microbial and metabolic markers that can be used in future studies to make mechanistic determinations of vaginal health based on menopause status. Such markers could ultimately allow physicians to distinguish normal age-related change from pathology with confidence, enabling more accurate diagnoses and better-targeted treatments. By anchoring those markers in mechanistic data rather than population averages, the project also lays groundwork for interventions that could support vaginal health across the postmenopausal decades.

AFAR leadership framed the award as part of a broader strategy to draw young investigators into aging research. “In an age of rapidly growing technologies to interpret big data sets, GerOmics research is a particularly novel approach to aging research and geroscience,” said Stephanie Lederman, EdM, Executive Director of AFAR. “AFAR is pleased to continue our collaboration with the Sagol Network to encourage early career investigators to focus their research on this vital emerging field that can help advance our understanding of the complex biology of aging in order to find interventions to help us all live healthier, longer.”

The award also reflects the scale of AFAR’s broader commitment to the field. The national non-profit has served for nearly half a century as what it describes as the talent incubator of aging research, providing nearly $232,000,000 to close to 4,600 investigators at premier research institutions to date. In 2026 alone, AFAR expects to provide approximately $6,522,000 to 56 investigators through a range of programs, and it works with public and private funders to steer high-quality grant programs and interdisciplinary research networks. AFAR-funded researchers have found that modifying basic cellular processes can delay, or even prevent, many chronic diseases simultaneously, and that it is never too late or too early to improve health. The Sagol Network, for its part, operates a virtual web of schools and research centers at leading academic and medical institutions, including the Sagol School of Neuroscience at Tel Aviv University and the Joseph Sagol Neuroscience Center at Sheba Medical Centre, along with bridge programs linking institutions such as MIT and Weizmann, Columbia University, and Monash University. The GerOmic Award, jointly administered with AFAR, exemplifies that global approach, and Cyphert’s selection signals where the field sees its next frontier: at the intersection of reproductive aging, microbial ecology, and the molecular data sciences.

Subject of Research: The 2026 Sagol Network GerOmic Award supporting omics research on reproductive aging and the postmenopausal vaginal microbiome

Article Title: Erika Cyphert, Ph.D., of the University of California San Diego receives 2026 Sagol Network Geromic Award for Junior Faculty

Article References: Erika Cyphert, Ph.D., of the University of California San Diego receives 2026 Sagol Network Geromic Award for Junior Faculty. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

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Keywords: AFAR, Sagol Network GerOmic Award, Erika Cyphert, UC San Diego, omics, geroscience, menopause, vaginal microbiome, metabolomics, metagenomics, reproductive aging, junior faculty award