Claudio Franceschi

Impact

Claudio Franceschi is an immunologist and Emeritus Professor at the University of Bologna, where he has held emeritus status since 2016 after serving as Full Professor of Immunology. In the 1990s he described a chronic, low-grade inflammatory state accompanying human ageing that he named 'inflammaging', a concept since taken up in research on immunosenescence and age-related disease. He was among the early investigators to study ageing directly in humans rather than mainly in mice, and has worked extensively on centenarians, their offspring and spouses as a model of healthy ageing without major age-related disease. From 1996 to 2005 he was Scientific Director of the Italian National Research Centre on Aging (INRCA), and he coordinated the EU FP6 project GeHA (Genetics of Healthy Aging) from 2004 to 2009. He also founded and directed Bologna's 'L. Galvani' interdepartmental centre for bioinformatics, biophysics and biocomplexity. The University of Bordeaux awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2018. His 2026 publications list the Institute of Biogerontology at Lobachevsky State University, Nizhny Novgorod.

Metrics

• h-index 163 · google scholar as of 2026-09-23 source ↗

Research output

17 works · 4,102 citations · h-index 4 OpenAlex ↗

Selected publications

• Chronic Inflammation (Inflammaging) and Its Potential Contribution to Age-Associated Diseases ↗ 2014 · 3,945 citations
• The conundrum of human immune system “senescence” ↗ 2020 · 124 citations
• The gut microbiome and ageing trajectories: mechanisms and clinical implications ↗ 2026 · 18 citations
• Associations between time spent in sedentary behaviors and metabolic syndrome risk in physically active and inactive European older adults ↗ 2025 · 5 citations
• exBAClock: A comprehensive database of published clocks for age quantification and age-related diseases ↗ 2026 · 4 citations

Links

Research fields