P. Kent Langston, PhD

Dr. Kent Langston is an assistant professor of Pathology at Yale School of Medicine and a member of the Yale Center for Research on Aging (Y-Age). He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University for his work in Dr. Tiffany Horng's laboratory on metabolic regulation of macrophage activation and tolerance. He completed his postdoctoral training with Drs. Diane Mathis and Christophe Benoist in the Department of Immunology at Harvard Medical School. In the Mathis-Benoist laboratory, Dr. Langston elucidated the dynamics of physiological inflammatory responses to endurance exercise in skeletal muscles and discovered that appropriate regulation of such inflammation is required for the muscle-specific and organism-level metabolic adaptations and improved performance typical of training. Specifically, his work identified interferon-gamma as a T-cell and NK-cell effector molecule that is unleashed in Treg-deficient mice and is necessary and sufficient to impair muscle mitochondrial function to the detriment of endurance-exercise performance.

The Langston laboratory is further defining the cellular and molecular features of exercise-induced inflammatory responses in youth and during aging – an endeavor that is partly supported by an NIA/NIH K22 award – with an emphasis on elucidating how non-parenchymal cells sense exercise and regulate its benefits. An ultimate goal of this work is to design exercise-inspired interventions to combat modern afflictions associated with chronic inflammation, improve regeneration and performance after injury, reduce the pathology of musculoskeletal diseases, and combat age-related frailty (i.e., increase healthspan).