Longevity

Maxim Shokhirev, PhD

11 years in practice

Head of Computational Biology and Data Science (Founding Member) · Tally Health

Computational biologist and Tally founding member; first author of the peer-reviewed CheekAge buccal aging clock

English

About

Maxim N. Shokhirev, PhD is a computational biologist and one of Tally Health's founding members, joining in March 2022 as Head of Computational Biology and Data Science. He is the first author of CheekAge (GeroScience, 2024), the peer-reviewed buccal DNA-methylation clock that defines Tally's TallyAge product, and the lead author on a 2025 follow-up comparing the Illumina MethylationEPIC v2.0 array against the Twist Human Methylome Panel for clock reproducibility. Before Tally, he spent eight years at the Salk Institute, rising to Senior Director of the Razavi Newman Integrative Genomics Bioinformatics Core.

What to Know

Signature approach

Shokhirev's work is clock-engineering: training and validating DNA-methylation aging models, then stress-testing them across measurement technologies. The CheekAge clock he led at Tally uses >200,000 methylation sites and was trained on >8,000 adults aged 18–100. A 2025 follow-up paper benchmarked CheekAge-class clocks across Illumina arrays and Twist methylation sequencing, showing principal-component-corrected versions stay reproducible across platforms while uncorrected clocks drift by years.

What sets them apart

  • First author of CheekAge. The 2024 GeroScience paper is the methodology paper Tally's TallyAge product is built on — he's listed first.
  • High-output computational biologist. Google Scholar reports ~10,800 citations, h-index 50, i10-index 80, 83 indexed articles — most longevity-brand scientists don't carry numbers like that.
  • Salk-trained. Eight years at the Razavi Newman Integrative Genomics Bioinformatics Core, rising to Senior Director leading a PhD-level team — a rigorous academic-core lineage transferred into a consumer-product context.

Expertise

Patient types

General Adult Longevity

Protocols & technologies

Dna methylation analysisEpigenetic age clocks (cheekage, horvath, hannum, dnam phenoage)Illumina methylationepic v2.0 arrayTwist human methylome panelPrincipal Component Corrected epigenetic clocksBioinformatics pipelinesSystems biology modeling

Affiliations

Tally HealthPrimary

Head of Research

Thought Leadership

Publications

Notable Collaborators

  • Adiv Johnson, PhD · Buccal epigenetic clocks (CheekAge); proteomic aging clocks
  • Tony Wyss-Coray, PhD · Proteomic aging clocks
  • Rusty Gage, PhD · Neuroscience and aging (Salk Institute)
  • Patrick D. Hsu, PhD · RNA-targeting CRISPR effectors

Other specialists at Tally Health

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