Healthy Lifespan Institute Annual Meeting 2026

We are delighted to invite you to the fourth in person Healthy Lifespan Institute (HELSI) Annual Meeting in Firth Hall on 26th June 2026!

The event was previously scheduled for 18 November 2025. If you had registered for the November date, we ask that you re-register so we can confirm accurate attendance numbers for catering purposes.  

Our fantastic programme will showcase our holistic and multidisciplinary approach to health and ageing with presentations from members across a wide range of disciplines and topics, including biomarkers of ageing and multimorbidity, data-driven approaches to health across the lifespan, and inequalities in ageing. Talks are designed to be accessible across disciplines in order to expand our interdisciplinary knowledge and connections.

Keynote speaker

Our Keynote speaker is Professor Claire Steves from King's College London presenting a talk on Healthy Ageing and the Gut Microbiome: A new angle for intervention?

Claire is a Professor of Ageing and Health, Head of Department of Twin Research and Genetic Epidemiology and Clinical Director of TwinsUK, King’s College London. She is also a Consultant Geriatrician at Guys and St Thomas’s NHS Foundation Trust, where she specialises in cognitive impairment and dementia assessment and management, particularly in the context of multiple medical problems.

Claire is interested in how each one of us ages differently and uses population studies like TwinsUK to understand what underlies this variability.  She works across health boundaries, interested in both physical and mental health and the intersections between them, including significant contributions to understanding of how COVID-19 and the pandemic affected older people. She established that environmental factors are particularly important in understanding trajectories of ageing.  This has led to focused work on the relationship between the microbiome and conditions of ageing, including cognitive ageing, frailty and multi-morbidity. Her research department studies ageing and health using biological and clinical collections, data linkage with health, educational and environmental records collaborating with ageing biologists and social and environmental scientists.  

She is Director of King’s Centre for Ageing Resilience in a Changing Environment (CARICE), a unique and novel initiative which aims to reduce the negative collective impact of the major global challenges of climate change and population ageing.

Claire has published more than 150 research articles in high impact journals and appears regularly in the media.