Fully Funded PhD: Developing our understanding of active and healthy ageing using biological assessments.

We are looking for a PhD candidate with a background in either human physiology or biomedical engineering/computer science to join our team in developing new ways to measure healthy ageing from genetic and health datasets. Ageing is usually quantified as a measurement of the time elapsed since birth (chronological age). However, this simple count cannot explain the large variations in the ageing trajectories that exist between older people of similar age.

For these reasons, researchers have tried to identify alternative descriptions of ageing based on assessments that reflect the “biological age” of an individual. This involves complex changes occurring in body systems, affected by thousands of genes and their interactions with environments and lifestyles. The research planned for this PhD project will take a new approach using data science and medical imaging to understand how biological age can be measured and used to describe the ageing process. We will develop metrics to accurately predict biological age with the longer-term goal of making the validated assessments available across very large populations of people for promoting healthy ageing. This will have an important impact on our society by raising the quality of life of older people living in our communities.

Project aims and objectives

• Comprehensive biomarker identification: The first phase involves conducting a review of existing literature, examining various biomarkers that have been used to assess biological age, and interrogating large existing databases (such as UK Biobank) to investigate potential biomarkers in this context.
• Physiological and functional assessments of human adults: This phase of the project will establish a unique dataset by recruiting human volunteers to complete assessments using advanced 3T magnetic resonance imaging to investigate the ageing brain and other body systems, as well as assessments of epigenetic changes to the DNA as biomarkers of biological age.
• Validation of Biological Age Biomarkers: The third phase of the project will validate a short form of the assessments from Phase 2 and develop an AI model and algorithm-driven approach that can be implemented for future, large-scale studies.