Alexandre Kalache
President, International Longevity Center Global Alliance

Since 2012 Professor Alexandre Kalache is President of ILC-BR, located in his birth city of Rio de Janeiro, and since 2015, co-President of the Global Alliance of ILCs.

Dr Kalache is a specialist in age-related issues. Specifically, his expertise is in the epidemiology of ageing & the life-course, inter-sectoral policy development (including age-friendly initiatives), health promotion, old-age care, human rights and migration within the context of ageing as well as the more general cultural complexities of the worldwide longevity revolution.

Dr Kalache has been a leading pioneer in ageing issues for close to forty years in various roles: as academic, international civil servant and advocate. His was one of the very earliest voices to articulate the global nature of population ageing, together with the potentialities and the risks through inaction inherent within it. His contributions toward the shifting of the traditional paradigms in the field of ageing are widely acknowledged on the global stage.

Building on his initial medical career in Brazil, Kalache spent more than thirty years studying and working in Europe and the USA; principally, London, Oxford, Granada, Geneva and New York. His post-graduate degrees, MSc in Social Medicine 1977 and PhD in Epidemiology 1993, were attained in the UK. From 1977 to 1984, he held the position of Clinical Lecturer and Senior Research Fellow (under the mentorship of Professor Sir Richard Doll) at Oxford University. He was the founder of the Epidemiology of Ageing Unit at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (the foremost UK School of Public Health) where he also taught from 1984 to 1995. At the same institution, he also conceived and coordinated the first ever European Masters Degree course in Health Promotion (1991).

From 1995 to 2008, Dr Kalache directed the World Health Organisation’s global programme on ageing in Geneva. Among many other enduring initiatives, he conceived and launched the WHO Active Ageing Policy Framework (2002) and the WHO Age-Friendly Cities project (2007).