I am a Rosalind Franklin Fellow and Chair of Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Groningen. Previously, I studied and worked at several other institutions (Cambridge, Oxford, Sheffield, Leeds). I investigate the evolution of ageing in humans and wild animal populations. For example, I discovered sex differences in ageing rates in a wild mammal population and effects of parental age at conception on offspring lifespan and reproductive success in a wild bird. These results radically alter our understanding of ageing in wild populations and have important implications for population dynamics and conservation biology, e.g., how we choose which individuals to use for conservation breeding programmes. I am a council member of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology and was a founding member of and chair of their Equal Opportunities committee. I am passionate about promoting diversity and inclusion in science, and my research also tackles this, for example, I demonstrated that the gender gap in research productivity increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. I also wrote a children’s book with a female scientist role model. I am an active advocate of Open Science and sit on the Awards Committee for the Society for Open Reliable Transparent Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. In the future, I will take an eco-evolutionary approach to address why individuals age differently, focusing on biological rather than chronological age and the impact of the social environment, which will shed new light on ageing.