Jeremy Walston is a Professor of Medicine in the Division of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology and a core faculty member in the Center of Aging and Health. He received his MD at the University of Cincinnati School of Medicine in 1988, and completed the General Internal Medicine residency program at the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center in 1991. During is Geriatrics Fellowship at Johns Hopkins between 1991 and 1993, he trained in the diabetes and genetics laboratories of Drs. Alan Shuldiner and Jesse Roth. During that period, he learned basic molecular and genetic approaches to complex disease, and helped to identify one of the first gene variants known to contribute to both obesity and type 2 diabetes mellitus. Because of his interest in Geriatric medicine and aging research, he has begun to focus on the physiologic and molecular changes associated with frailty in older adults. He and Dr. Linda Fried developed several hypothetical models for the Geriatric syndrome of frailty, and has set out to test many of these hypotheses in human populations.

Some recent important findings from this research include the identification of inflammatory , blood clotting, and endocrine factors that associate with frailty, and several novel myostatin gene variants that may influence muscle strength in a subset of older adults.

He is presently operates a molecular biology laboratory on the Bayview Campus, and is the clinical co-manager of the Genetic Core of the OAIC. He has an ongoing pilot project on frailty in humans. He serves as a member of the General Clinical Research Center advisory committee. He is also the medical director of the Terrace Rehabilitation Unit, a 26 bed acute and subacute rehabilitation unit located in the Johns Hopkins Geriatrics Center.

Frailty, inflammation, biology, older adults

He has won numerous award and prizes for his research, including the American Geriatrics Society New Investigator Award in 1995, a Brookdale National Fellowship in 1996, and a Paul Beeson Physician Faculty Scholars in Aging Award in 1998.