Prof. Heike A. Bischoff-Ferrari, DrPH is am MD with board certification in geriatric medicine, general internal medicine and rehabilitation. She holds a Master's degree and doctoral degree from the Harvard School of Public Health and has been Chair of Geriatrics and Aging Research at the University of Zurich since 2013. Since 2016, she has established the first DO-HEALTH-associated university medicine consultation for healthy longevity in Switzerland.
Prof. Bischoff-Ferrari has been coordinating DO-HEALTH, the largest European intervention study and biobank on healthy longevity - within a network of European and American universities - since 2012. The aim of this research effort is to investigate the combined effect of three preventive measures (vitamin D, omega-3 and exercise) on the ageing process, as well as to identify early risk profiles to slow biological ageing and thereby reduce the risk of functional decline and disease.
In 2021, Prof. Bischoff-Ferrari received a Lifetime Achievement Award for her research on Healthy Aging from the ICFSR in Boston. Since 2020 she has been a board member of the Harvard working group MINDING OUR FUTURE: Healthy Aging, Food, and Lifestyle, and since 2022 she has been a member of the WHO Clinical Consortium Healthy Aging.
Since 2023, as a visiting professor at Toulouse University Hospital, INSERM and University III Toulouse, she coordinates the national research program IHU HealthAge approved by President Emanuel Macron, in collaboration with Prof. Bruno Vellas (Founding President IHU HealthAge) and an International Board of leading scientists in the field of Biology of Aging (President SAB Prof. Luigi Ferrucci). The ten-year research program builds on DO-HEALTH and the INSPIRE & ICOPE Care Toulouse cohorts, and aims to develop new biomarkers and treatments in a collaborative national and international research network that will strengthen physical and cognitive functions and slow biological aging processes that protect function. The goal of the IHU HealthAge is also to build an open-science global coalition of translational research in Geroscience and healthy longevity to collaboratively accelerate the prevention of tomorrow and give people early access to new prevention methods.
In 2024 Prof. Bischoff-Ferrari is Visiting Professor at Harvard Medical School, Marcus Institute on Aging.