In science, results are only as meaningful as the rigor with which they’re evaluated. At XPRIZE Healthspan, we’re on a mission to change how the world approaches aging—supporting new therapies that could extend healthy years of life for people around the globe. Driving that kind of impact starts with thoughtful, credible evaluation.
That is why my team and I have worked diligently to build a coalition of expert judges prepared to assess innovations with scientific rigor and open minds over the course of the seven-year competition. After months of work, we are proud to present our Judging Panel.
To build the right group, we worked closely with our Scientific Advisory Board to find a diverse pool of potential judges with expertise in critical fields including health clinics, geriatrics, clinical trials, translational geroscience, biomarkers, Alzheimer's disease and brain aging, immunology, large pharmaceutical R&D, and venture investment. These experts needed to fairly and rigorously assess a wide span of technologies with application in our competition’s endpoints: muscle, cognitive, and immune function.
We knew that our work could not be successful without balancing this technical knowledge with a wide array of perspectives across gender, geography, and professional backgrounds including trialists, geroscientists, clinicians, policy experts, epidemiologists, and leaders from both academia and industry. We also felt it was important to include at least one judge with experience in venture capital and investment, expertise critical in scaling innovations.
We began with a pool of more than 80 potential candidates and started narrowing down our field. Encouragingly, one of our most consistent issues was finding that qualified candidates were unavailable as they were planning to compete in the competition.
We settled on an initial panel of 13 judges, but when we received 188 Qualifying Submissions from competing teams, it became clear that we needed additional support in certain specialized areas. So, we added three ad-hoc reviewers with expertise in stem cell therapies, plasmapheresis, and AI-aided drug screening to ensure every submission was appropriately evaluated.
This group brings a strong mix of knowledge, experience, and perspective. The process of selecting them has been one of the most thoughtful and collaborative processes of the competition to date. I’m humbled and grateful for these leaders’ commitment to the future of humanity.
- Dr. Jamie Justice, Executive Director of XPRIZE Healthspan
Meet our Judging Panel below and learn about their backgrounds, why they joined the seven-year journey, and what excites them most about the future of XPRIZE Healthspan.