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Dr. Steven Austad joined the department of cellular and structural biology at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio in 2004. A fellow of the Gerontological Society of America since 1993, he is a past recipient of the Robert W. Kleemeier Award (2003) for outstanding research and the Geron Corporation-Samuel Goldstein Distinguished Publication Award (1994) from that Society. He also received as well the Nathan A. Shock Award (1994) from the Gerontological Research Center of the National Institute on Aging. 

Dr. Austad currently serves on the editorial board of seven journals, including Neurobiology of Aging, Aging Cell, Journals of Gerontology: Biological Sciences, and The Journal of Population Ageing. With Dr. Edward J. Masoro, he co-edited the 5th (2001), 6th (2006) and 7th (2010) Editions of the Handbook of the Biology of Aging. He continues to serve, since 2001, on the Initial Review Group for aging grants of the Ellison Medical Foundation and is currently Research Committee Chair for the American Federation for Aging Research. In addition, he co-directs (with Dr. Gary Ruvkun, Harvard University) the 3-week summer course on the Molecular Biology of Aging at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory on Cape Cod.

His major research interests focus around why some species live short lives with rapid physical decay and others live much longer, and attempting to identify the underlying cellular and molecular mechanisms that account for such species differences.