Centre for Ageing Resilience In a Changing Environment - CARICE

Welcome to CARICE

CARICE is a new centre of excellence within the faculty of Life Sciences and Medicine (FoLSM) at King’s College London.

The Centre is led by Professor Claire Steves from the School of Life Course & Population Sciences and will involve scientists and research teams from all the Schools in the Faculty working on ageing research.

Our vision

The centre mission is to centralise and focus ageing research across the Faculty of Life Sciences & Medicine to reduce the negative collective impact of the major colliding global challenges of climate change and population ageing.

The centre brings together the Faculty senior and early career researchers together with clinicians specialised in ageing to share expertise and ideas to:

• Identify specific advice and treatments to increase and maintain good health of our ageing population.
• Provide a research environment to support future grants to study how to increase resilience in the ageing population.

About the centre: CARICE's objectives

An important area in ageing research is the concept of resilience. Resilience is our ability to cope and bounce back from external or internal stressors or events that result in physical or emotional stress.

One of the biggest threats to health globally is our rapidly changing environment, including changes in climate, with direct and indirect effects through economic uncertainty and international insecurity. Older people are the most vulnerable.

We believe that older people can increase their biological and social resilience in the face of environmental and physical stressors thanks to scientific knowledge, innovation and understanding.  Science can help older people maintain good physical and mental health for longer.

CARICE wants to understand the mechanisms that unable individuals maintain health and full functions resisting the negative impact of ageing. We also want to identify interventions and solutions to help those less advantaged.

Our core themes

The research within the institute spans four core areas or themes that cover key aspects of clinical and scientific exploration into ageing resilience and the environment. The themes allow researchers to coalesce under shared interests to better facilitate transdisciplinary investigation.

	Theme 1: Biology of ageing resilience (Bio-AR) This theme brings together existing strengths from biological scientists across FoLSM and clinical academics. All working on ageing, from cells, to tissue samples and organoid cell cultures to whole organisms with cohorts. By bringing them together with clinical teams we will create a roadmap to accelerate translation to human settings.
	Theme 2: Lifestyles and ageing resilience (Life-AR) This theme links King’s strengths in ageing from nutrition, exercise, physiology, behaviour change modification, rehabilitation, social science, with health economics and MedTech to find new insight.
	Theme 3: Environmental stressors and ageing resilience (ES-AR) This theme will investigate how local and socio-economic environments in the UK and globally can be modified to promote ageing resilience as environmental stressors change and intensify.
	Theme 4: Innovations to promote ageing resilience (Innovate-AR) In the clinical sphere, as well as the development of new lab methodologies, informatics and AI-tools, to enable world-leading resilience research and novel techniques for older people to cope with clinical and social stressors.