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= John Roland Beard = John Roland Beard (born in Adelaide, Australia in 1955) is a prominent global health expert, particularly in relation to population ageing. He is currently Director of Ageing and Life Course with the World Health Organization in Geneva.

Early Life and Education
Beard was born in Adelaide, South Australia in 1955 to father Roland Beard, an obstetrician, and mother, Christine. Beard attended St Peters College in North Adelaide for his entire schooling years, moving on to study Medicine at the University of Adelaide in 1972.

Early career
Beard graduated in Medicine and Surgery from the University of Adelaide in 1979. He undertook postgraduate training in South Africa and the United Kingdom, before working as medical officer for an Aboriginal community controlled medical service in Kempsey, NSW, Australia. He subsequently established a private practice with his then wife. He returned to Adelaide to undertake training in the Master of Public Health, but transferred to the University of Sydney where he completed a PhD on the health impact of pesticide exposure. He worked for 15 years in rural Australia, initially as Director of the North Coast Public Health Unit in Lismore, Australia, and subsequently as the inaugural Head of the Northern Rivers University Department of Rural Health, a joint initiative of the University of Sydney and Southern Cross University. In 2000, he was Manager of Public Health for the Sydney Olympic Games. He later moved to the United States where he was senior epidemiologist with the New York Academy of Medicine.

His main research focus is the impact of the physical and social environments on a wide range of outcomes including bloodborne infections, cancer, ischaemic heart disease, depression, adverse birth outcomes and, increasingly, trajectories of healthy ageing.

International career
Beard joined WHO as Director of Ageing and Life Course in 2009. From October 2010 to April 2012 he held the additional responsibility of Director (a.i.) of the Department of Gender, Women and Health. In 2012, building on work done by his predecessor [null]Alexander Kalache, he launched the Global Network for Age-friendly Cities and Communities with Michael Bloomberg, the Mayor of New York City. The Network has since grown to include municipalities responsible for well over 100 million people, including Washington, Chicago, Manchester, Brussels, Oslo, Tehran, Seoul, as well as parts of New Delhi and Kolkatta. In 2012, he also coordinated World Health Day for WHO with the topic “Population Ageing – Good Health Adds Life to Years”. Beard has worked closely with other international organizations, particularly the World Economic Forum, and from 2012 to 2016 was chair or vice chair of the Forum’s Global Agenda Council on an Ageing Society. He has moderated several sessions at the Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, and was an editor of the Forum’s influential monograph Population Ageing: Peril or Promise. He is a prominent keynote speaker at major international conferences, and acted as Master of Ceremonies for high level events for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation in St Petersburg and San Francisco.

Healthy Ageing
Currently, Beard leads the team that produced the World report on ageing and health in 2015, and who drafted the Global strategy and action plan on ageing and health , which was adopted by the 2016 World Health Assembly. These publications reframe the concept of Healthy Ageing around the ability of an older person to do the things that are important to them, rather than simply the absence of disease. They can be viewed as a counterpoint to dominant stereotypes of older people either as frail and dependent, or as healthier than in the past and having an obligation to remain in the workforce. Instead, they emphasise that these stereotypes are the two extremes of a broad spectrum of health and experience of older age and call for public policies that embrace this diversity and respond to it in ways that enable older people to do the things that matter to them.

During Beard’s tenure, WHO has also emphasized that the diversity observed in older age is not random, but reflects the cumulative impact of advantage and disadvantage across people’s lives. The Organization has called in many forums for policy that will address, rather than reinforce, these inequities. Drawing on the capabilities approach of Amartya Sen, the World report frames the expenditure required to achieve this as investments that give older people the freedom “ to live lives that previous generations might never have imagined”.

Key Recent Publications
WHO. World report on ageing and health. World Health Organization, Geneva 2015.

JR Beard, A Officer, I Araujo de Carvalho, R Sadana, AM Pot, JP Michel, P Lloyd Sherlock, J Epping-Jordan, G Peters, WR Mahanani, J Amuthavalli Thiyagarajan, S Chatterji. The World Report on Ageing and Health: a policy framework for healthy ageing. The Lancet 2016; 387 (10033): 2145-2154.

Hanson MA, Cooper C, Sayer AA, Eendebak R, Clough GF, Beard JR. Developmental Aspects of a Life Course Approach to Healthy Ageing. Journal of Physiology. 2016; 594(8): 2147-2160.

John R. Beard, David E. Bloom. Towards a Comprehensive Public Health Response to Population Ageing. Lancet. 2015 February 14; 385(9968): 658–661

Aboderin I, Beard J. Older People's Health and Socioeconomic Development in sub-Saharan Africa. Lancet. 2015; 385 (9968) e9-e11

Peter Lloyd-Sherlock, John Beard, Nadia Minicuci, Shah Ebrahim and Somnath Chatterji. Hypertension among older adults in low and middle income countries: prevalence, awareness and control. International Journal of Epidemiology 2014;1–13 doi:10.1093/ije/dyt215 (see also High Hypertension Rates in Low- and Middle-Income Countries – News and Analysis, JAMA, 2014 March; 311(11): 1101)

Lusti-Narasimhan M, Beard JR. Sexual Health in Older Women. Bulletin of the World Health Organization. 2013; 91:707–709 | doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.2471/BLT.13.119230

[null Beard JR, Cerdá M, Blaney S, Ahern J, Vlahov D, Galea S. Neighborhood characteristics and change in symptoms of depression in older residents of New York City. American Journal of Public Health.] 2009;99(7):1308-1314. .

Beard JR, Blaney S, Cerda M, Frye V, Lovasi G, Ompad D, Rundle A, Vlahov D. Environmental characteristics and disability in older adults. Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences. 2009 64B(2):252-257

Beard JR, Lincoln D, Donoghue D, Taylor  D, Summerhayes R, Dunn TM, Earnest A, Morgan G. Socioeconomic and maternal determinants of small for gestational age births: patterns of increasing disparity. Acta Obstetricia et Gynecologica Scandinavica 2009; 88 (5):575 – 583.

Barnett L, van Beurden E, Morgan P, Brooks L, Beard JR Childhood Motor Skill Proficiency as a Predictor of Adolescent Physical Activity. Journal of Adolescent Health. 2009 Mar;44(3):252-9.

Beard JR, Tracy M, Vlahov D, Galea S. Trajectory and socioeconomic predictors of depression in a prospective study of residents of New York City Annals of Epidemiology. 2008;18 (3):235-43.

45 and Up Study Collaborators, Banks E, Redman S, Jorm L, Armstrong B, Bauman A, Beard J, Beral V, Byles J, Corbett S, Cumming R, Harris M, Sitas F, Smith W, Taylor L, Wutzke S, Lujic S. Cohort profile: the 45 and up study. International Journal of Epidemiology. 2008 Oct;37(5):941-7.

Beard J. DDT and Human Health. Science of the Total Environment 2006; 355 (1-3): 78-89. John Beard, Tim Sladden, Geoffrey Morgan, Geoffrey Berry, Lyndon Brooks, and Anthony McMichael. Health Impacts of Pesticide Exposure in a Cohort of Outdoor Workers. Environmental Health Perspectives May 2003; 111 (5) : 724-730

Biographies
"Global ageing guru | Medical Journal of Australia".

"WHO | "We were older then, we are younger now""

Videos of John Beard
Uppsala Health Summit (2014-06-16), John Beard, WHO, speaks at Uppsala Health Summit

World Economic Forum (2015-10-26), Abu Dhabi 2015 - Issue Briefing: Sustainable Development Goals

Oxford Ageing (2013-11-20), John Beard - Keynote speech: 'From Talk to Action',

Leuphana Digital School (2013-01-23), John Beard 1/5 - Life Expectancy & Social Change - Leuphana Digital School,