Miguel Godinho Ferreira is a Directeur de Recherche (DR1) at CNRS and group leader at IRCAN (Université Côte d’Azur, Nice). His research focuses on how telomere shortening and DNA damage impact tissue homeostasis, drive inflammation and promote aging and cancer. Using zebrafish as a short-telomere vertebrate model, his group showed that telomerase is required for normal lifespan, that short telomeres in key barrier organs trigger local and systemic aging, and that gut-specific telomerase expression can counteract systemic aging and reduce cancer incidence without global telomerase activation. More recently, his lab identified the cGAS-STING-Interferon pathway as a central sensor of telomere-derived DNA damage in vivo, linking short telomeres to inflammaging, senescence and tumor incidence.