10 Women Longevity Experts Spearheading the Science of Aging Well

Melissa Eamer

Melissa Eamer, Former CEO and Founder of Modern Age

Although Eamer had been a successful executive at Glossier and Amazon, it wasn’t until she witnessed her mother’s rapid decline that she found her true calling as the founder of New York-based longevity clinic Modern Age. When her mother passed away in her early 60s, never getting the chance to meet her granddaughters, Eamer started to ask herself, “How much was genetics, how much was lifestyle? What could I, or anyone, have done to change her trajectory?” 

As these questions around aging healthfully began to weigh on her, Eamer formulated the concept for Modern Age. “I wanted to do for others what I wasn’t able to do for my mom: to show that we can take control of the way we age. To give people the tools and information to make the right choices,” she says. She was particularly inspired by the research around ‘subjective age,’ which suggests that people who feel younger than they are end up with longer, healthier lifespans. Modern Age’s longevity-focused healthcare is based on those findings, improving patients’ quality of life by preventing age-related decline. 

“I believe everyone deserves a personalized plan and time with their doctors to reach their physical and mental peak,” says Eamer. To accomplish that, Modern Age offers women an Aging Wellness Assessment that reviews over 50 biomarkers, cognitive test results, a skin analysis and a bone density scan. Based on those results, you’re provided with a holistic view of how you’re aging and a tailored plan to address challenges such as brain fog and lack of libido.

She’s since moved on to a new role after Modern Age was acquired in 2024.

Jennifer Garrison

Jennifer Garrison, PhD, Neuroscientist, Faculty Member in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology at UCSF

Jennifer Garrison did not set modest objectives when she founded her research lab at the Buck Institute—nor when she co-founded the Global Consortium for Reproductive Longevity and Equality (GCRLE). “The goal both in my lab and the Global Consortium is to discover the fundamental drivers of ovarian aging so that we can preserve women’s health,” she says. Studying female reproductive aging is essential to the larger longevity conversation because, in her words, ”ovaries are the architects of health and the pacemaker for aging in women’s bodies.” And when the hormones that ovaries release start to decline in midlife, it leads to an increased risk of developing disease including dementia, depression and osteoporosis.

To say that Garrison is pioneering a new movement to advance the science of female reproductive aging is not exaggerating. Her research is “charting a new path that requires a new area of science at the interface of longevity and reproductive biology,” she says. And, similar to the plight of women lobbying for more menopause research, there is a lack of data and funding for our understanding of aging in women’s bodies. “At GCRLE, we’ve engaged an army of scientists to innovate and build a sustainable, impactful research field,” Garrison says. “We do this by giving away grants to scientists all over the world and creating resources to help them translate their discoveries into women’s hands faster.”

In 2025, Garrison co-led the creation of the “Double X Prize”—a $50 million XPrize competition set to launch in January 2026, that challenges scientists to develop better ways to track ovarian health across a woman’s entire lifespan, the Wall Street Journal reported. Her goal? To shift the narrative that ovaries are only relevant during reproduction. “They are a proxy for what is driving aging in everyone,” she told the WSJ. Garrison hopes the prize will fuel innovations that benefit not only women, but humanity at large.

Melanie Goldey

Melanie Goldey, CEO of Tally Health

Imagine a world where you can do the things you love—exercise, travel, have great sex—well into your 70s and 80s. That’s a world Melanie Goldey didn’t just want to fantasize about, she wanted to build it. After holding executive positions at Refinery 29 and Everyday Health Group, Goldey wanted to channel her business-scaling skills towards the future of aging for women. In 2022, she became the CEO of Tally Health, a consumer biotech company that develops science-backed tools and resources to increase people’s healthspan. 

“Tally Health’s mission is to change the way we age,” she says. “Based on scientific advances, we no longer have to grow old and experience chronic disease and disability decades before death.” The program entails a proprietary DNA analysis (just swab your cheek!) that determines your biological age; based on those results, you’re given a personalized lifestyle plan supported by a supplement that slows cellular aging. Goldey is particularly driven to increase the healthspan of women. “As traditional caregivers, too many women focus their efforts on others while neglecting their own preventative care,” she says. “It’s our hope that Tally will help women streamline that process through access to personalized recommendations based on their unique epigenetic data, so they know that the changes they are making will have the highest impact for them.” 

Elissa Epel

“There’s only one way to compress morbidity, and that is to slow our biological aging.” That powerful statement was made by Elissa Epel at the global 2019 Happiness and Its Causes conference. The professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco went on to explain what regulates that clock on life: telomeres. As she says, if you’ve never heard of them before, you will never forget them now. “[They] are the protective caps for our DNA. As we age, they shorten but not at the same rate as time—it’s about the wear and tear inside our cells that we can control inside our body,” she explains. “When telomeres get too short, that cell either dies or becomes an old age cell. We need long telomeres so our cells can keep replenishing.”

The groundbreaking research on telomeres is the topic of her best-selling book The Telomere Effect, co-written by Nobel Laureate Elizabeth Blackburn, in which the scientists explore the changes we can make to our daily habits that protect our telomeres—thereby increasing the time we can spend healthy, active and free of disease. “All the cells in our brain, blood, bones, we have these cells that replenish and refresh across our lifespan,” she says. “That’s how we can live well to 100—we want to protect our telomeres.”

Epel has continued her quest to mine the science behind longevity and well-being in her latest book, The Stress Prescription, in which she studies how psychosocial and behavioral practices, such as meditation, can slow down the aging process.

Robin Berzin

Dr. Robin Berzin, Founder and CEO of Parsley Health

What Dr. Robin Berzin set out to do with her company Parsley Health is nothing short of revolutionary: Her mission is to make functional medicine affordable and modern, so more people can access a holistic approach to health. “Recently, I’ve been worried that women’s health has become narrowly redefined as reproductive health and maternity care,” she says. “But we are so much more than our reproductive organs.” By practicing root cause medicine, Berzin and her team of providers are able to help female patients with complex health needs find solutions at a lower cost. “Too many women are left to bounce around between specialists without a single home base for their care as rates of chronic conditions continue to rise.”

Berzin really does practice what she preaches: In addition to being a doctor, founder and CEO, she is a mom to three. “As a doctor, I know that addressing women’s whole health means connecting the dots between different organ systems, addressing the root cause of our symptoms and ensuring we have a place to go for our complex health needs,” she says. To that end, she is committed to making Parsley Health a core provider for women’s care by ensuring it’s accessible and affordable through insurance and employer plans.

Increasing access to world-class functional medicine is always at the top of Berzin’s agenda: “We’re working with some of the nation’s largest health plans to make our cutting-edge care more accessible through insurance,” she says. Parsley Health is now in network for more than 10 million patients across New York, California, Oregon and Washington and is on track to sign more health plan contracts across the country.  

Coleen Murphy

Coleen Murphy, Director of the Paul F. Glenn Laboratories for Aging Research at Princeton University

You probably wouldn’t think that the secrets to longevity are hiding in C.elegan worms. But Coleen Murphy has devoted her esteemed career as a professor of molecular biology at Princeton University to proving just that: She has studied how these worms, whose genomes have functional counterparts in humans, can help us understand the fundamental biological rules that govern aging. “The goal of my lab is to enrich our understanding of the molecular basis of the aging process by first identifying the genes that are controlled by these global regulators,” she told Princeton Talks in 2022, “and then elucidating the cell biological and biochemical mechanisms used by these genes to affect lifespan.”

Murphy, who was given the Pioneer Award by the National Institutes of Health in 2015, has used her C. elegan research to demonstrate our ability to potentially slow human aging, which could lead, in turn, to new therapeutics and treatments for age-related disease. “While aging may appear to be simply an unfortunate consequence of living, recent genetic breakthroughs suggest that aging is a regulated process, rather than the result of cumulative cellular damage,” she explains. In her book How We Age: The Science of Longevity, Murphy chronicles the history of longevity research and expands on its links to reproduction, cognitive function and the gut microbiome. 

Xiaoran Liu

Xiaoran Liu, Assistant Professor at Rush University Medical Center and the Rush Institute for Healthy Aging

It’s no surprise that what we eat has a direct impact on our cognitive function. What makes Xiaoran Liu’s research so impactful is illustrating how a certain diet actually has the capacity to lower the risk of cognitive decline as we age. “Studies show that greater adherence to a MIND dietary pattern is associated with a slower rate of cognitive decline and lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease,” she told the Washington Post. Foods in the MIND diet are rich in antioxidants, including leafy green vegetables and berries. “The combination of these nutrients with antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects may potentially benefit the brain.”

One landmark study conducted by Liu and her colleagues found that people who closely followed the MIND diet had a 53% lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s. Because the brain is vulnerable to oxidative damage, Liu explains, the nutrients in those brain-healthy foods can be helpful. As she has continued her quest to understand the connection between diet and cognitive function, Liu was awarded the Alzheimer’s Association Research Grant in 2022. “If successful,” she told the Alzheimer’s Association, “a primary prevention treatment could delay the onset, prevent the loss of memories and preserve independence for a large proportion of the older population.” 

Jamie Justice

Jamie Justice, PhD, Executive Director of XPRIZE Healthspan and Adjunct Professor in Internal Medicine – Gerontology and Geriatric Medicine at Wake Forest University School of Medicine (WFUSM)

Jamie Justice isn’t just changing how we think about aging—she’s trying to redefine how we test it. As the executive director of XPRIZE Healthspan, Justice is leading one of the most ambitious longevity projects to date: a $111 million global competition designed to accelerate the development of interventions that can reverse biological aging by at least a decade in adults ages 50 to 80. The goal? To extend not just lifespan, but healthspan by targeting the root biology of aging rather than chasing down individual diseases.

A geroscientist by training, Justice has spent her career turning the science of aging into actionable therapies. Her work helped lead the first-ever human trial of senolytics—experimental drugs aimed at clearing out senescent, or “zombie,” cells that accumulate with age and contribute to chronic disease. “We initiated a team-based system for shared protocols and data management to accelerate progress in testing geroscience-guided interventions,” Justice told the American Federation for Aging Research (AFAR) in 2022. “This experience also uncovered just how much basic research was needed to fully understand cell senescence as a target for drug development.”

But clinical trials are just one piece of her longevity puzzle. Justice is also a founding leader of the Geroscience Education and Training Network (GET Network), a nationwide initiative to build the next generation of aging researchers. “Fostering autonomy, development, and leadership for early career investigators is vital to establishing the field of geroscience,” she told AFAR.

With XPRIZE Healthspan, Justice has raised the stakes—literally. The competition, which will run through 2030, requires teams to develop multi-system interventions that improve cognition, immunity and muscle function in both men and women. 

Justice, who also serves as an adjunct professor of gerontology and geriatric medicine at Wake Forest University’s School of Medicine, explained to the Wall Street Journal that an important predictor of longevity—for both genders—is the age at which a person’s mother entered menopause. The later a woman goes through menopause, the more likely she is to live longer—along with her sons and daughters—suggesting that there are common genes involved in longevity that scientists have yet to discover. “If we understand what is happening, we can unlock secrets about biological aging in women and in men,” she told the WSJ.

Dr. Vonda Wright, Orthopedic Surgeon, Researcher and Author

The long held idea that women should just accept that they’ll become weaker and more frail with age—and that they can’t do anything about it—has colored conversations around longevity. Dr. Vonda Wright, a double-board certified orthopedic surgeon, longevity expert and author, is a key voice leading the charge to show that’s not true.

At a launch event for her book Unbreakable: A Woman’s Guide to Aging with Power, Wright said that although time will inevitably pass, “we have the ability to choose not to be the victims of the passage of time…my attitude is that we have the agency to take control over the things we have control over.”

Through her work, research and reach on social media, Wright has helped cut against the idea that aging automatically means decline by sharing science-backed strategies for what she calls “active aging.” 

This attitude is what makes Wright’s work so useful and engaging: she’s used her extensive knowledge as a surgeon and researcher to dig into which longevity practices  set women up to maintain their resilience, vitality and mobility as they age. Some examples include her groundbreaking research on how master athletes can preserve performance as they age and the musculoskeletal syndrome of menopause (MSM), the too often-dismissed joint, bone and muscle impacts caused by estrogen loss due to menopause. 

Sabrina Johnson

For too long, women’s pleasure has been derided, ignored and put on the back burner. Perimenopausal and menopausal women especially have had to weather the challenges and stigma of sexual dysfunction without clear solutions. But thanks to Sabrina Johnson, a CEO who has worked in women’s health innovation for more than 20 years and whose biotech company solely focuses on innovations in the space, that’s no longer the case. 

Daré Bioscience launched DARE to PLAY, a cream that contains the same active ingredient as Viagra that can boost women’s desire and sexual health. This innovation means we’re closer to closing the gender desire gap and further bolsters the idea that women’s sexual health is a key tenet of their overall health—and one that’s worthy of research, innovation and investment. 

“Men were very loud about the fact that it was so critical to their sexual function and sexual activity to be able to have an erection. With women, it has been viewed as more complicated … but it’s not,” she previously told Flow Space. “It’s really not that much more complicated. There’s desire [and] there’s arousal, just like in men.”

The company also funds clinical trials into products related to women’s longevity and health.