With support of the foundation, the new Healthy Longevity Center at the University of Zurich will be launched. The center aims to become an exemplary research and innovation accelerator dedicated to exploiting research from a range of disciplines on the complexity and heterogeneity of healthy ageing to foster innovation and societal impact with partners from the private and public sectors.
Different perspectives can be gathered under the term healthy ageing. The foundation is interested in supporting research that does not see older age as a disease-striken life stage but studies older persons in their context, their resources, what stabilizes functioning and improves quality of life in older age. Together with the University of Zurich (UZH) and Professors Mike Martin (Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences) and Harald C. Gall (Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics), the foundation has found partners which share a common understanding in this approach.
While many research initiatives in the field of healthy ageing exist, it remains a challenge to find ways to harness the research results and translate insights into innovation and make them available to the broad public. Also, the WHO Baseline Report on the Decade of Healthy Aging (2020) calls for initiatives to translate research on the complexity of ageing into societal impact. With funding from Velux Stiftung, the UZH now initiates the Healthy Longevity Center.
Tailoring interventions and innovation in the field of healthy ageing needs to consider that every older person is unique with a distinct health status, an environmental and socio-cultural context as well as the individual’s daily behaviour. The Healthy Longevity Center will make the heterogeneity of older age and the complexity of real-life data visible and facilitate the transfer to application. It will coordinate the acquisition, enrichment, integration, and valorization of complex healthy longevity data, as well as build capacity in healthy ageing innovation management research.
As a science-funding foundation with a strong interest in transfer, Velux Stiftung saw a unique opportunity to support a project with long-term and systemic impact. The foundation is convinced that supporting this ecosystem for research and innovation where different expertise, disciplines and stakeholders convene, will push the field of healthy ageing forward – as well as enable more people to benefit from healthy ageing research and to maintain functional ability and quality of life in older age.
