Impact
Luigi Ferrucci is a geriatrician and epidemiologist who has been Scientific Director of the US National Institute on Aging (NIA) since May 2011. Since 2002 he has led the NIA Longitudinal Studies Section and directed the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging (BLSA), which he has refocused on normal ageing and the development of age-associated frailty. His research investigates the causal pathways that lead to progressive physical and cognitive decline in older people. Trained at the University of Florence, he earlier led geriatric rehabilitation and clinical epidemiology at the Italian National Institute of Aging and was principal investigator of the InCHIANTI study of risk factors for mobility disability in Tuscany. He has contributed to the design of other population studies, including the Women's Health and Aging Study and the AKEA study of centenarians in Sardinia. He was senior author of a 2024 Nature Medicine consensus paper on validating biomarkers of ageing. For the longevity field his work links ageing biology to long-term human cohort data and to the effort to define measurable biomarkers of human ageing.
Metrics
- h-index 290 · google scholar as of 2026-09-23 source ↗
Research output
12 works · 65 citations · h-index 3 OpenAlex ↗
Selected publications
- MRI-based multi-organ clocks for healthy aging and disease assessment ↗ 2025 · 28 citations
- Associations Between Female Sex Hormones and Skeletal Muscle Ageing: The Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging ↗ 2025 · 26 citations
- Co-occurrence of disadvantage conditions in elderly subjects with depressive symptoms ↗ 1997 · 7 citations
- A proposed path to explaining the unexplained anemia of aging ↗ 2025 · 3 citations
- Associations of accelerometer-estimated sleep with cardiorespiratory fitness and energetic efficiency among middle-aged and older adults ↗ 2025 · 1 citations