LEAF director Elena Milova was recently at the International Longevity and Cryopreservation Summit in Madrid. During the conference, she caught up with life extension advocate Didier Coeurnelle.
In this interview, Didier discusses his projects and shares advice to the community regarding what kind of activities can help foster progress in the development of rejuvenation biotechnology.
Didier is one of the most active members of the European life extension community, co-president of HEALES (Healthy Life Extension Society), vice-president of French Transhumanist Association Technoprog, and a founding member of the International Longevity Alliance.
He is also a long-term member of the local ecology movement. Didier is currently a lawyer in a Belgian federal government agency for social security. Didier is the main organizer of the biennial scientific conference Eurosymposium on Healthy Ageing, held in Brussels, Belgium.
In this interview, he focused on the extension of healthy human life and the control of technological risks, the so called “existential risks”.
We appreciate Didier taking the time to share his vision with us and we are also grateful to him for his generous contributions to the research projects hosted at Lifespan.io.
Elena has been a longevity activist and advocate since 2013, when she first started to organize educational events to make new evidence-based methods of healthy life extension more popular.
The last few years have seen Elena leading some successful projects in Russia, aimed at spreading the idea of healthy longevity among decision makers as well as the general public. Several years of lobbying resulted in the inclusion of her propositions in the strategic program documents of the Russian Federation related to the problems of the elderly. She is a co-author of the book “Aging Prevention for All” (
in Russian, 2015), where, among other topics, she is sharing how to facilitate the adoption of the healthy lifestyle to promote the period of good health.
In 2015, Elena helped to shape and coordinate the successful crowdfunding campaign of the
Major Mouse Testing Program – a study of Senolytic drug combinations on mouse lifespan.
In 2017 at LEAF, Elena led a successful advocacy project to include the problems of the elderly into
the WHO’s 13th Programme of Work .
Previously Elena has worked as a project manager in the pharmaceutical and advertisement industries, helping to promote new drugs and therapies. This experience helped her to realize that the existing therapies were not 100% effective and could not completely stop age-related diseases – which has ignited an interest for the development of innovative therapies.
Elena graduated with a bachelor’s in both psychology and foreign languages and is now working to earn her MBA at the oldest Russian business school MIRBIS.
Write a comment: