Population GeroScience: How breakthroughs in aging biology inform population health science
New knowledge of the molecular biology causing aging-related health decline has launched billion dollar startups and transformed research to develop drugs to prevent disease and increase healthspan. As part of this effort, scientists are developing biomarkers to quantify the pace and progress of biological processes of aging, for example the famous “epigenetic clocks”. These biomarkers offer population health science new opportunities: they can enhance capacity to surveil populations to anticipate future burden of disease and offer more sensitive endpoints for intervention evaluation. In the mean time, they are already making clear that the most profound opportunities for intervention to modify aging biology and extend healthspan are not drugs, but policies and programs that address the social and physical environments in which we grow up and grow old.
Daniel Belsky's research sits at the intersection of public health, population & behavioral sciences, and genomics. His studies seek to understand how genes and environments combine to shape health across the life course. The goal of Dan's work is to reduce social inequalities in aging outcomes in the US and elsewhere.
Dan’s focus for the past several years has been on development and evaluation of methods to quantify the pace and progress of biological process of aging in young, mid-life, and older-adult humans and the application of these methods to study:
- How life-history and social factors contribute to individual differences in healthy aging
- Whether and how aging processes can be modified by intervention.
