Europe is the world region in which population ageing is most advanced and debates about the implications, for older people themselves and society as a whole are fierce. One source of concern is the perception that family support for older people may be in decline just at the point at which it is needed most. In this presentation Emily Grundy will firstly present results from UK and European research on demographic and other influences on intergenerational support, including kin availability. She will then consider how individual family life course trajectories, namely fertility and marital histories, influence later life health and well-being. Finally she will discuss implications for the future.

Emily Grundy is a demographer whose main work over the past twenty five years has been on aspects of individual and population ageing. She is a Distinguished Visitor to the ARC Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research (CFEPAR). Since 1998 she has worked at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine where she is Professor of Demographic Gerontology. Previous appointments have been at the Institute of Gerontology, King’s College London, where she played a large role in setting up the first multidisciplinary MSc course in Gerontology in the UK, and at City and Nottingham Universities. In May 2012 she takes up a new appointment as the first Professor of Demography at Cambridge University, UK.

Emily’s main research interests are families, households and kin and social networks in later life, especially in relationship to health and trends and differentials in later life health, disability and mortality. She has a particular current interest in longer term health consequences of different family pathways and in health inequalities at older ages. Current research projects include leadership of a task group reviewing health inequalities among older Europeans as part of the Marmot/WHO European Review of the Social Determinants of Health; leadership of the new multidisciplinary Pathways project which aims to identify the pathways that link socio-demographic circumstances to adult health and  directorship of the Centre for Longitudinal Study Information and User Support  which for the past ten years has promoted and facilitated research use of census record linkage data in England and Wales. Emily has published over 200 research papers, book chapters and books. She is past president of the British Society for Population Studies, Secretary-General and Treasurer of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population and a member of a number of European and UK scientific advisory and editorial boards.

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