Speakers
Michel POULAIN
Emeritus Professor University of Louvain, Belgium, Senior Researcher Tallinn University, Estonia. Michel Poulain was originally skilled in astrophysics at University of Liège (ULg) he received a PhD in demography at Université catholique de Louvain (UCL). As demographer, he is specialized in Longevity studies. Currently emeritus professor at UCL, he is also Senior Researcher at the Estonian Institute for Population Studies at Tallinn University (Estonia). He has been President of the Société Belge de Démographie (1984- 1990) and later of the Association Internationale des Démographes de Langue Française (AIDELF) (1988- 2000). Involved in centenarian’s studies since 1992 he is active member of the International Database on Longevity (IDL) and the International Centenarian Consortium (ICC). He validated the age of several supercentenarians including Antonio Todde, Johan Riudavets and Emma Moreno, each of them holding the Guinness record of longevity. He also invalidated the age of numerous others including the famous supercentenarians of the Caucasus. In 2000, he was involved in validation the age of the numerous centenarians in Sardinia in cooperation with Gianni Pes, a Sardinian Medical Doctor. In this framework, he introduced the concept of Blue Zone when identifying an exceptional longevity area in the mountainous part of Sardinia. The original term Blue Zone was related to the blue pen that he used to shape the longevity area on the map of Sardinia. In two Sardinian villages, Villagrande and Seulo, he demonstrated with colleagues an exceptional situation where men live as long as women do, a unique situation in our modern societies. Thereafter in cooperation with Dan Buettner, he identified other Blue Zones in Okinawa, the Nicoya Peninsula (Costa Rica) and Ikaria (Greece). Michel Poulain delivered more than 100 speeches on exceptional longevity and Blue Zones on the 5 continents. He disseminated the lessons of the Blue Zones to both scientific and general public in a very comprehensive way. The search for new Blue Zones is going on and he is willing communicate his passion for this quest to everybody.
https://longevitybluezone.com/
Interview with prof. Michel Poulain in the Journal Fakty UMP No. 2/2023 p. 20
