Understanding and promoting healthy aging is a global imperative but there is currently no consensus on how human healthy aging can or should be measured. This Nature Forum, part of the 3rd annual Healthy Longevity Symposium, aims to help address this gap by featuring some of the latest research advances on the topic, and by fostering consensus-building and forward-looking discussions at the edge of the field.  The themes discussed will include measuring body and organ function as we age, how to transition the clinical management of midlife and older adults beyond disease and toward the promotion and maintenance of functional capacities, how to measure aging and its trajectories at the biological level using multi-dimensional datasets, and how to leverage technology, digital systems and artificial intelligence to better understand and track aging. How these research advances inform public health, impact our societies and influence policy-making will also be addressed at the event.

*Access to this Nature Forum will be included in your registration for the 3rd Healthy Longevity Symposium, which includes additional talks, conference proceedings, coffee breaks and lunches.



Event details

November 13-14, 2025
Abu Dhabi, UAE
In-Person Event

John Beard
John Beard

Irene Diamond Professor and Director

International Longevity Center, Columbia University, New York, USA

John Beard is Irene Diamond Professor and Director of the International Longevity Center USA at Columbia University, New York.  He was previously Director of Ageing and Life Course with the World Health Organization in Geneva where he led major global initiatives including the World report on ageing and healththe Integrated Care for Older People (ICOPE) program and the Global Network of Age-friendly Cities and Communities which now covers over 350 million people. He has worked extensively with the World Economic Forum including as chair of their Global Agenda Council on Population Ageing, and was a commissioner with the recent US National Academy of Medicine Commission on Healthy Longevity. His research frames health from the perspective of functioning rather than disease, and he applies this approach to aging-related issues ranging from biological drivers through to the societal implications of population aging. He recently reported significant improvements in functioning in more recently born participants of a large English longitudinal study, and is currently extending this analysis to see if these improvements are also seen in other countries and across all socioeconomic tiers of the whole population.   
Jamie Justice
Jamie Justice

Adjunct Professor in Internal Medicine Section on Gerontology and Geriatric Medicine

Wake Forest University School of Medicine, North Carolina, USA

Dr. Jamie Justice is the Executive Vice President Health Domain and Executive Director of the $101M Healthspan Prize at the nonprofit XPRIZE Foundation, and Adjunct Professor in Internal Medicine at Wake Forest University School of Medicine (WFUSM). Jamie completed graduate and postdoc training at University of Colorado Boulder before joining faculty at WFUSM. Jamie’s scientific work is dedicated to geroscience, an emerging field that seeks to change the way we think about and treat aging, by looking at the biologic root to proactively reduce the incidence of multiple age-related diseases, functional decline, and disability. She was the recipient of the Jarrahi Research Scholars Fund in Geroscience Innovation, the Vincent Cristofalo Rising Star in Aging Research, and the 2022 NIA Nathan W Shock Awardee.

 

Dr. Justice’s leadership at XPRIZE uses a competition model to drive capital to innovation and catalyze transformative solutions to optimize health for all, advance personalized approaches, and ignite breakthroughs in biotechnology and biomedicine. She leads the $101M XPRIZE Healthpsan global competition to incentivize teams from around the world to develop and demonstrate innovative therapeutic solutions that make healthy human aging possible. Dr. Justice also leads the design and development of future prizes for breakthroughs in health, including a new in-design program to improve ovarian function and support women’s health across the lifespan.

XPRIZE Website.                     http://www.xprize.org

  • Social Media Handles: @XPRIZE
  • LinkedIn: @j_n_justice
  • Twitter: @jamie-justice-ph-d-6b933146
Nicole Sirotin
Nicole Sirotin

Chief Executive Officer

Institute for Healthier Living, Abu Dhabi, UAE

Nicole Sirotin is the CEO of the Institute for Healthier Living Abu Dhabi. For the last 19 yrs, Dr. Nicole has been an academic physician leader building programs in lifestyle medicine and precision medicine including 10 years at Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi as Department Chair. She is also a Clinical Assistant Professor at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine and has taught at Weill Cornell Medical College and Albert Einstein College of Medicine
Dr. Sirotin’s work in Lifestyle Medicine is transformative, combining a unique approach within the UAE by applying the principles of precision medicine with personalized scientific lifestyle strategies to help patients prevent and reverse diseases. One of her most significant achievements is the creation of and implementation of a groundbreaking Lifestyle Medicine program within the CCAD Cancer Center. This program ensures that every cancer patient receives precise treatment aimed at reducing side effects, minimizing recurrence, and improving overall survival rates.

Dan Belsky
Dan Belsky

Associate Professor of Epidemiology

Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York, USA

Dan Belsky is Associate Professor of Epidemiology at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public in the Robert N Butler Columbia Aging Center, where he directs the Center’s Geroscience Computational Core. His group develops methods to quantify the pace and progress of biological aging in young, midlife, and older adult humans and applies these methods in epidemiological studies and clinical trials to identify opportunities for intervention to increase healthy lifespan. His work is supported by the US National Institute on Aging, the Russel Sage and Jacobs Foundations, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and Impetus Grants. He is co-director of the American Federation for Aging Research (AFAR) FAST Initiative to develop novel biomarkers of aging using biospecimens from completed clinical trials and a member of the Scientific Advisory Boards of X-Prize Healthspan, AFAR, as well as several large-scale research projects. He is an inventor of the Pace of Aging method and the DunedinPACE epigenetic clock. Since 2020, he has been named an ISI highly-cited researcher.
Andrea Maier
Andrea Maier

Professor of Medicine, NUS Academy for Healthy Longevity

National University of Singapore, Singapore

Andrea Maier (1978), a Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians (FRACP), graduated in Medicine (MD) 2003 from the University of Lübeck (Germany), was registered 2009 in The Netherlands as Specialist in Internal Medicine-Geriatrics and was appointed Full Professor of Gerontology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (The Netherlands) in 2013. She was the head of Geriatrics at the Vrije Universiteit Medical Center from 2012 to 2016. From 2016 to early 2021 Professor Maier served as Divisional Director of Medicine and Community Care at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, Australia, and as Professor of Medicine and Aged Care at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Professor Maier’s research focuses on unraveling the mechanisms of ageing and age-related diseases. During the last 10 years she has conducted multiple international observational cohort studies and intervention trials and has published more than 350 peer-reviewed articles, achieving an H index of 63, spearheading the significant contributions of her highly acclaimed innovative, global, multidisciplinary @Age research group. She is a frequent guest on radio and television programs to disseminate aging research and an invited member of several international academic and health policy committees, including the WHO. She is the past president of The Australian and New Zealand Society for Sarcopenia and Frailty Research, the founding president of the Healthy Longevity Medicine Society and serves as selected Member of The Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities.

Jackie Han
Jackie Han

Professor

College of Interdisciplinary Studies, Center for Quantitative Biology, Peking University, Beijing, China

Prof. Jing-Dong Jackie Han obtained Ph.D. degree from Albert Einstein College of Medicine. She had her postdoctoral training at The Rockefeller University and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. In 2004, she became an investigator/professor at the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. In 2010-2019, she was a director of the CAS-Max Planck Partner Institute for Computational Biology. In 2019, she became Boya professor at Peking University. Her research focuses on the structure and dynamic inference of molecular networks,using a combination of large-scale experiments and computational analysis to explore the design principles of the networks and to find how the complex phenotypes, in particular aging and stem cell development are regulated through molecular networks.

Vadim Gladyshev
Vadim Gladyshev

Professor of Medicine and Director, Center for Redox Medicine

Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts, USA

Vadim Gladyshev is Professor of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and Associate Member at the Broad Institute. Dr. Gladyshev received his undergraduate (1988) and graduate (1992) degrees from Moscow State University, followed by postdoc training at NIH (1992-1997). Dr. Gladyshev was elected to AAAS, recognized as Redox Pioneer and received the Osborne and Mendel Award. In 2021, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He is the recipient of NIH Pioneer, Transformative and Eureka awards to study aging. Dr. Gladyshev’s lab focuses on studying aging, rejuvenation and lifespan control using a combination of experimental and computational approaches. He has published more than 450 articles.

Cornelia van Duijn
Cornelia van Duijn

Professor of Epidemiology

University of Oxford, Oxford, England

Professor Cornelia Van Duijn is a statistical geneticist and epidemiologist working at the forefront of genomics research of Alzheimer disease and dementia. Through-out her career, professor van Duijn has bridged start-of-the art –omics research, integrating (epi)genetic, transcriptomic, proteomic, metabolomic and microbiome data. Her current research focuses on the cross talk between age, apolipoprotein E and other genes involved and the risk of dementia and brain health. Professor van Duijn leads the AI and big data team Oxford British Heart Foundation Center of Excellence (BHF-CRE), in which she researches the interplay between vascular pathology and neurodegeneration over the life course. She further co-leads with professor Masud Husain the Dementia Research Oxford (DRO) consortium and with Professor Eva Morris she co-leads the Health Data Research (UK HDRUK) Oxford regional network. Cornelia is a member of Royal Academy of Science of the Netherlands, fellow of the Medical Science (UK) and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).  She further is part of the scientific advisory board of the German Centre for Neurodegenerative diseases (DZNE), Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland (FIMM’ chair), The LOOP Zurich translational research center, and Genomique France.  Cornelia is also member of the supervisory board of The Lifelines Cohort (Lifelines) of the University Medical Centre Groningen and Groningen University.  
Nathan Price
Nathan Price

Professor and Co-Director of the Center for Human Healthspan

Buck Institute for Research on Aging, California, USA

Dr. Nathan Price is Professor and Co-Director of the Center for Human Healthspan at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, and is also Chief Scientific Officer of Thorne, a science-driven wellness company that serves 5 million+ customers and 47,000 health-care practitioners. Previously he was CEO of Onegevity, an AI health intelligence company that merged with Thorne in 2021, and Professor and Associate Director of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle for a decade. He is co-author with biotechnology pioneer Lee Hood of a 2023 bestselling book, The Age of Scientific Wellness, published by Harvard University Press. In 2019, he was named one of the 10 Emerging Leaders in Health and Medicine by the National Academy of Medicine, and in 2021 he was appointed to the Board on Life Sciences of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. He was the chair of the NIH Study Section on Modeling and Analysis of Biological Systems (MABS) from 2018-2020. He is also a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, and Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar, and was the 2023 recipient of the Alexander & Mildred Seelig Award for science from the American Nutrition Association.
Heike Bischoff-Ferrari
Heike Bischoff-Ferrari

Chair of Aging Medicine

University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland

Prof. Bischoff-Ferrari is Chair of Geriatric Medicine and Head of the Department of Acute Aging Medicine FELIX PLATTER at the University of Basel. She is a specialist in general internal medicine, geriatric medicine, and rehabilitation and holds a doctorate in public health from the Harvard School of Public Health. 

Prof. Bischoff-Ferrari coordinates the Swiss Campus for Healthy Longevity at the University of Basel, which aims to ensure that new knowledge is made available to the population. The Swiss campus also brings together a global research network of leading aging researchers from 12 universities to investigate new molecular biomarkers of biological aging and new treatments to extend healthy life expectancy (Global Health Span Extension Consortium). Heike Bischoff-Ferrari is the principal investigator of DO-HEALTH & DO-HEALTH-BioAge, Europe's largest study on extending healthy life expectancy, and is an advisor to the WHO's Clinical Consortium on Healthy Aging and a board member of the international Academy of Health and Lifespan Research.

Eran Segal
Eran Segal

Professor of Computer Science

Weizmann Institute of Science

Eran Segal is a prominent Israeli computational biologist and professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science. 

He is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the Weizmann Institute, leading a lab focused on computational and systems biology. His research explores the links between the microbiome, nutrition, and genetics on human health, aiming to develop personalized medicine and nutrition strategies by analyzing large datasets. 

Segal is known for his work in personalized nutrition, emphasizing that individual responses to food vary. He has published extensively, with over 200 publications, and advised the Israeli government during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

His awards include the Overton Prize (2007), the Michael Bruno award, election to the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) and the Young Israeli Academy of Science, and ERC grants. 

Guang-Hui Liu
Guang-Hui Liu

Professor of Biophysics

Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, Beijing, China

Guang-Hui Liu is a researcher and a fellow of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences. He is also a fellow of the International Union of Physiological Sciences and currently serves as the Director of the Academic Committee at the Beijing Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine. Dr. Liu has dedicated his career to the field of aging biology. Over the past decade, he has published over 150 research papers in Cell, Nature, Science and other journals. He has also been authorized 33 patents (including 2 PCT patents). Dr. Liu has received the Xplorer Prize, China Youth Science and Technology Award Special Award, Tan Jiazhen Prize in Life Sciences Innovation, Outstanding Scientific and Technological Achievement Award issued by Chinese Academy of Sciences, National Innovation Pioneer Medal, and first prize for the Overseas Chinese Contribution Award. In addition, his representative works were selected as the “Top Ten Advances in Chinese Science" in 2020, the “Top Ten Advances in Life Science in China" in 2018 and 2020, Most Cited Chinese Researchers (ELSEVIER, 2020, 2022). Furthermore, he has been invited to publish reviews and opinions on Cell, Cell Metabolism, Nature Metabolism, Nature Medicine, and Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology. Dr. Liu actively engages with the international scientific community, serving as the President of both the Chinese Society of Aging Cell Research (CSACR) and the Aging Biomarker Consortium. Additionally, he holds the roles of Editor-in-Chief at Life Medicine, Deputy Editor-in-Chief at Protein & Cell, and serves on the editorial boards of Cell Reports and Aging Cell.

Terrie Moffitt
Terrie Moffitt

Nannerl O. Keohane University Professor of Psychology

Duke University, North Carolina, USA

Terrie E. Moffitt, Ph.D., is the Nannerl O. Keohane University Professor of Psychology at Duke University, and Professor of Social Development at King’s College London. Her expertise is in the areas of longitudinal methods, developmental theory, clinical mental health research, neuropsychology, and genomics in behavioral science. She is uncovering the consequences of a lifetime of mental and behavioral disorder on processes of aging.

She is the Associate Director of the Dunedin Longitudinal Study, which follows a 1972 birth cohort in New Zealand. She also co-founded the Environmental Risk Longitudinal Twin Study (E-Risk), which follows a 1994 birth cohort in the UK. Dr. Moffitt also is a licensed clinical psychologist, with specialization in neuropsychological assessment. She has a published record of collaboration with criminologists, economists, geneticists, epidemiologists, sociologists, demographers, gerontologists, statisticians, neuroscientists, medical scientists, even opthalmologists and dentists.

Dr. Moffitt’s work was recognized in 2018 by election to the National Academy of Medicine. She holds honorary doctorates from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, and Universitat Basel, Switzerland. For her research, Dr. Moffitt has received both the American Psychological Association's Early Career Contribution Award and Distinguished Career Award. Dr. Moffitt was also awarded a Royal Society-Wolfson Merit Award, the Klaus-Grawe Prize, and was a recipient of the Stockholm Prize in Criminology, NARSAD Ruane Prize, the Klaus J. Jacobs Research Prize, and in 2022 the Grawemeyer Prize. Her service includes serving as chair of the Board on Behavioral, Cognitive, and Sensory Science at NASEM, Chair of the NIA Data Monitoring Committee for the Health and Retirement Study, and Chair of the Jury for the Klaus J. Jacobs Prize in Switzerland. She is a fellow of the British Academy, Academy of Medical Sciences (UK), Academia Europa, Association of Psychological Science, American Society of Criminology and the National Academy of Medicine. 

Dr. Moffitt attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for her undergraduate degree in psychology. She continued her training in psychology at the University of Southern California, receiving an M.A. in experimental animal behavior, and a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. She also completed postdoctoral training in geriatrics and neuropsychology at the University of California, Los Angeles Neuropsychiatric Institute. In her spare time, she works on her poison-ivy farm in North Carolina.

Michael Snyder
Michael Snyder

Professor of Genetics

Stanford University, California, USA

As a pioneer of Precision Medicine, Dr Michael Snyder has invented many technologies enabling the 21st century of healthcare including systems biology, RNA sequencing, and protein chip. Dr Snyder has initiated the Big Data approach to healthcare through his work using omics to detect early-stage disease, including wearables to detect infectious diseases like COVID-19, and at-home microsampling to measure hundreds of molecules from a single drop of blood. He is the first researcher to gather petabytes of data on individuals, which is 1 million - 1 trillion times more data than the average clinician collects. He has published over 900 papers and is one of the most cited scientists. In terms of commercial success, Dr Snyder has co-founded 17 companies (including 2 unicorns) with combined enterprise value of over $6 billion. 
Alex Aliper
Alex Aliper

President

Insilico Medicine, Abu Dhabi, UAE

Alex Aliper, PhD, is the President of Insilico Medicine. He pioneered the application of AI in multi-omics data for drug discovery and drug repurposing, generative chemistry and generative biology and put an AI-designed drug into human clinical trials. He built a team of over 100 AI engineers that developed state-of-the-art software products for target discovery, small molecule generation and clinical trial outcome prediction, and he has published over 50 peer-reviewed publications. He was recognised as "Top 100 AI Leaders in Drug Discovery and Advanced Healthcare" by Deep Knowledge Analytics. In 2020, Endpoint News selected Alex Aliper as the top 20 under 40 biotechnology executives globally.
Joris Deelen
Joris Deelen

Associate Professor, Molecular Epidemiology

Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden, The Netherlands

Joris Deelen is an associate professor at the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) in the Netherlands. Moreover, he is still actively running a research group at the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing (MPI-Age) in Cologne. His group at the LUMC is focussed on the identification and validation of biomarkers of ageing using epidemiological and clinical studies. The main emphasis is on biomarkers that have been identified in large-scale international collaborations of human studies using omics-based approaches, such as metabolomics. In addition, his group is performing in-depth analyses of lifestyle-based intervention studies to identify omics-based profiles indicative of a health-promoting response. Another main focus of his groups in the LUMC and MPI-Age is the identification and functional characterisation of genetic variants linked to human longevity. To this end, they make use of the CRISPR/Cas9 system to generate transgenic cell lines and mice harbouring the identified variants and subsequently measures their functional effects in vitro and in vivo.