Areas of Specialty:
Animal models of frailty
Interventions to mitigate frailty
Biomarkers of frailty
Susan Howlett
Dalhousie University, Canada
Susan Howlett is Professor of Pharmacology and Medicine (Geriatric Medicine) at Dalhousie University in Halifax, where she has taught for more than 30 years. She has led discovery research into how age, frailty, and sex steroid hormones affect cardiovascular function and predispose towards diseases in later life. Her laboratory pioneered the measurement of frailty in naturally aging animals with novel "frailty index" (FI) tools based on deficit accumulation and has used results from aging animal studies to develop a now widely used tool based on blood abnormalities (the FI-Lab) to measure frailty in people. She has published over 200 peer-reviewed papers (with 12578 citations, 6622 since 2021), 16 encyclopedia/book chapters, and has given more than 145 invited national and international presentations. Her work has been selected as Editor’s Choice, featured in numerous editorials, and has been F1000Prime Recommended. With a strong record of funding from agencies including the Canada Biomedical Research Fund, the River Phillips Foundation, the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, and the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada (HSFC), she has held uninterrupted support from one or more of these agencies since 1990. Her current research projects are: (1) The STRONG Study (STudy on bluebeRries, prOteiN, and exercise for improvinG frailty and cardiovascular disease) in adults 65 years and older; and (2) The AVENGER (Study Advanced LNP RNA Vaccines Engineered with Next-Generation designs to Enhance pandemic Readiness) in frail and aging mice.