08/14/2026
View from AFAR: Here’s to 45 —and Beyond
AFAR celebrates its forty-fifth year in 2026, and I just marked my forty-sixth. Both milestones bring new questions about what it means to grow older and whether the years ahead can be healthier, more active, and more fulfilling than the ones before.
As a geroscientist, those questions have guided my career. Early on, an AFAR grant gave me the opportunity to pursue research at a pivotal moment, when geroscience was just beginning to gain traction. The idea that we could target the biology of aging itself, instead of treating one age-related disease at a time, was still emerging, but it was already changing how many of us thought about medicine.
Today, we know that by understanding and addressing the biological drivers of aging, we have the potential to extend the years of life spent healthy, independent, and thriving.
That possibility is what continues to motivate my work. As Executive Director of the XPRIZE Healthspan competition, I have the opportunity to bring together scientists, students, clinicians, entrepreneurs, innovators, and investors to accelerate the development and validation of interventions that have the potential to make healthy aging possible for everyone.
AFAR is a key partner in this work: we're collaborating directly with AFAR on a scientific grant program that will define what meaningful 10-, 15-, and 20-year improvements in healthspan actually look like — the very thresholds our grand prize will be judged against.
Progress like this doesn't happen overnight. Every breakthrough builds on years, often decades of research, sustained investment, and organizations willing to support bold ideas long before they become widely accepted.
AFAR has spent the past 45 years doing exactly that. I'm proud to be among the nearly 5,000 aging researchers whose careers were shaped by its early support, and I'm grateful that investment helped put me on the path to leading efforts like XPRIZE Healthspan today.
Congratulations to AFAR on 45 years of advancing the science of healthy aging—and to the many discoveries still ahead!
— Jamie N. Justice, PhD, is the Executive Vice President of the Health Domain at XPRIZE Foundation and Adjunct Professor in Internal Medicine, Section on Gerontology and Geriatric Medicine at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. Dr. Justice received AFAR’s Glenn Foundation for Medical Research Postdoctoral Fellowships in Aging Research in 2016 and the Vincent Cristofalo Rising Star Award in Aging Research in 2022. Additionally, she helped launch AFAR’s FAST (Finding Aging biomarkers by Searching existing Trials) Initiative in 2022, now a program supported by the federal Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health’s (ARPA-H) PROactive Solutions for Prolonging Resilience (PROSPR) program. In her current role, Jamie Justice co-directed the AFAR-administered grant program, XPRIZE Healthspan Longitudinal Data Analysis Select Awards.
