LSE Health's Emilie Courtin named CIFAR Global Scholar for 2026–28
Dr Emilie Courtin, Associate Professor in the Department of Health Policy and director of the LSE Health Inequalities Lab, has been named a CIFAR Global Scholar for 2026–28, a prestigious international fellowship recognising rising stars in research.
The CIFAR Global Scholars Program, run by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), supports outstanding early-career researchers to develop and lead high-risk, high-reward interdisciplinary research. Scholars join one of CIFAR's interdisciplinary research programmes for two years, collaborating with leading global researchers, attending international meetings, and receiving targeted leadership training. Applications are accepted once a year from researchers worldwide across the natural, biomedical, and social sciences, as well as the humanities.
Emilie's selection reflects both the ambition of her research agenda and its alignment with CIFAR's mission to address some of the most important questions facing science and humanity.
Investigating the long reach of early life on healthy ageing
As a CIFAR Global Scholar, Emilie will focus on the impact of early life interventions on healthy ageing across the lifecourse. Her research begins from a striking premise: growing older is inevitable, but the pace at which we age is not. Adverse social circumstances - poverty, disadvantaged neighbourhoods, disrupted home environments - can accelerate biological ageing, in turn raising the risk of early disease, disability, and premature death.
Proving that early life interventions can slow this process is methodologically challenging, since traditional health outcomes like heart disease take decades to appear. Emilie tackles this in two ways: by revisiting high-quality past experiments, dormant trials, and linking them to administrative health data to trace long-term effects; and by using cutting-edge biological ageing measures, including ageing clocks, which can detect meaningful changes over years rather than decades.
Two ongoing projects illustrate the approach. The first revisits Project STAR, a 1980s trial in Tennessee that randomly assigned children to smaller or standard class sizes, with lasting benefits for test scores, graduation rates, and earnings, and dramatic reductions in racial gaps in education. Those children are now in midlife, offering a rare opportunity to examine whether smaller classrooms also led to better health outcomes. The second focuses on the Preparing for Life trial, a parenting intervention in Dublin that is the longest-running of its kind in Europe. Data collection of saliva samples is underway to assess whether the programme has left an epigenetic signature, potentially slowing biological ageing in participating children.
"I am delighted to have been selected as a CIFAR Global Scholar for 2026–28. CIFAR's unique model of interdisciplinary collaboration is an exciting opportunity to forge lasting partnerships across fields, and bring fresh perspectives back to my research on early life interventions here at LSE. I cannot wait to get started." - Emilie Courtin
About Emilie Courtin
Dr Emilie Courtin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Health Policy and director of the LSE Health Inequalities Lab. She co-directs the MSc in Health Policy, Planning and Financing (HPPF). Her research combines social epidemiology and social policy to assess how non-medical policies influence health, disease, and health care use. She holds a PhD from the Department of Social Policy at LSE, for which she was awarded the 2018 Richard Titmuss Prize for best thesis. She was previously a David E. Bell Fellow at Harvard University and an MRC Skills Development Fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Find out more about the LSE Health Inequalities Lab.