Claire is a Professor of Ageing and Health and the Clinical Director of TwinsUK, King’s College London. She is also a Consultant Geriatrician at Guys and St Thomas’s NHS Foundation Trust.

Claire is interested in how each one of us ages differently and uses population studies like TwinsUK to understand what underlies this variability. She works across health boundaries, interested in both physical and mental health and the intersections between them. She established that environmental factors are particularly important in understanding trajectories of ageing. This has led to focused work on the relationship between the microbiome and conditions of ageing, including cognitive ageing, frailty and multi-morbidity. Claire also leads a high profile Wellcome Longitudinal Population Study grant to expand our ability to contribute to health sciences, by using data linkage with health, educational and environmental records, and social and environmental scientists.

In 2020 she brought her clinical experience to the design of the Zoe Covid study app which reached over 4 million people, and since then has led research on the impact of COVID-19 infection itself and the pandemic overall on lived experience of the participants. She also is the longitudinal population study lead on the National Core Study of Health and Wellbeing which aims to understand the health, social and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic including how the pandemic has affected older populations.

Claire has published more than 100 research articles in high impact journals and appears regularly in the media.