Carol Jagger is the AXA Professor of Epidemiology of Ageing at Newcastle University and Deputy Director of the Newcastle University Institute for Ageing (http://www.ncl.ac.uk/ageing/). Her research programme spans demography and epidemiology with a focus on mental and physical functioning in ageing. She is the leadiing UK researcher on healthy life expectancy and is a Chartered Scientist, a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society and the Gerontological Society of America and an Honorary Fellow of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries.