Our Team

Dr. Douglas Seals

Laboratory Director

Dr. Douglas Seals is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Integrative Physiology at the University of Colorado Boulder. He obtained B.S. degrees in Education and Business from William Jewell College, M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Exercise and Applied physiology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and postdoctoral research training in Aging and Applied Physiology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. After an initial tenure-track faculty position at the University of Arizona, he moved his laboratory to the former Department of Kinesiology at the University of Colorado Boulder in 1992, while creating the first-ever joint appointment by a campus faculty member in the CU School of Medicine (Divisions of Geriatric Medicine and Cardiology).

Professor Seals’ primary research interest is to establish lifestyle and pharmacological strategies that optimize cardiovascular function with aging and thereby extend the period of healthy life (“healthspan”). Much of his recent work has focused on preventing vascular aging (the major cause of cardiovascular disease), and promoting translational physiological approaches in biological and biomedical aging research. Professor Seals’ laboratory provides scientific training at the undergraduate, M.S., Ph.D., postdoctoral and junior faculty levels. His research has been continuously funded by research grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), particularly the National Institute on Aging (NIA), since 1986.

Professor Seals’ founded an NIH General Clinical Research Center (now Clinical Translational Research Center) at the University of Colorado Boulder in 1999, which provides a core facility for conducting biomedical research on human subjects. He also established the first formal Responsible Conduct of Research program for the CU-Boulder campus and served as its director in 2011. Dr. Seals has trained 108 undergraduate students, 136 graduate students and 37 post-doctoral fellows during his career. Over the past few years, Dr. Seals has developed and published numerous commentary articles sharing his strategies for optimal career development academic biomedical research. A history of all Dr. Seals’ publications can be found here.

Awards: In 2004, he received a 10-year MERIT Award from NIA to support his research on cardiovascular aging. In 2008, Dr. Seals was named Professor of Distinction in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder. He was named by the American Physiological Society as its 2013 Edward F. Adolph Distinguished Lecturer for his research on the beneficial effects of regular exercise in promoting healthy cardiovascular aging. In 2015, he presented the 109th Distinguished Research Lecture at CU Boulder. Most recently, in 2022, he was awarded Honor Award from the Environmental and Exercise Physiology Section of the American Physiological Society.

Contact Information
Seals@colorado.edu
303-492-5305