Archives: Speakers

Hiroko Akiyama is a widely recognized gerontologist and an expert on issues of global aging. She is currently a visiting professor at the Institute of Gerontology and Institute for Future Initiatives at the University of Tokyo. Professor Akiyama has conducted several cross-national surveys and is known for a long-running research on the elderly in Japan—tracking the aging patterns of approximately 6,000 Japanese elderly over 35 years. She also initiated social experiment projects that pioneer re-designing communities to meet the needs of a highly aged society. Her recent work includes the Kamakura Living Lab, a platform for open innovation to address challenges faced by citizens by a method of co-creation among users, industry, governments and academia. The Lab was started in 2017 in the seaside city of Kamakura with a rapidly aging society.

Professor Akiyama started the Institute of Gerontology at University of Tokyo in 2006. She was the vice president of the Science Council of Japan. She received her Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Illinois and served as a fellow at the US National Institute on Aging and as a research professor at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research.

DY Suharya has more than 20 years of experience in public health, public private partnerships and communication. She worked as a Health Communication Consultant with the World Bank, WHO and UNICEF. She has taken the lead in supporting 20 Alzheimer’s Disease International members in the Asia Pacific in advocacy, leadership and capacity building initiatives.

Suharya holds a Master of Public Health (MPH) from Curtin University, Australia, a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism, from Ohio State University, USA and a Diploma in English Literature from the University of Indonesia.

• In 2022, the UN Decade of Healthy Ageing recognized Suharya as a “Healthy Ageing 50” leader for transforming the world to be a better place to grow older. Recently, she was also recognized as a Global Ageing Influencer by Ageing Asia.

Suharya holds a Master of Public Health (MPH) from Curtin University, Australia, a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism, from Ohio State University, USA and a Diploma in English Literature from the University of Indonesia.

Twitter handle: @DYSuharya

Ritu Sadana has more than 30 years of experience championing health equity in both public and private sectors in low, middle- and high-income countries. Sadana led the research and writing of the World Health Organization’s Decade of Healthy Ageing: baseline report, coordinated the development of the first WHO Global Strategy on Ageing and Health, including conceiving the objective towards the UN Decade of Healthy Ageing 2021-2030, and co-authored the WHO World Report on Ageing and Health.   

Sadana also leads the WHO Secretariat for the independent Council on the Economics of Health for All, which recently issued its Final Report. The document calls for a radical reorientation of economic and financial policy to increase public and private investments for health in multiple sectors.   

She is the principal investigator of WHO’s efforts to fill in evidence gaps and implement a life course approach in practice that connects a good start to life, healthy development and healthy ageing by involving policymakers, researchers and civil society in health, education, labour and social protection.   

She holds a Doctor of Science from Harvard University, an MSc in Public Health and a BA from University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), with expertise in economics, epidemiology, demography and health policy. Sadana has over 200 scientific and policy publications. 

Twitter:  @RituSadana