Gabriele Doblhammer is a Full Professor for Empirical Methods and Demography at the University of Rostock(http://www.wiwi.uni-rostock.de/~esf/). She is head of the Demography Group at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Disease in Bonn (http://www.dzne.de/). In addition, she is a Distinguished Research Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (http://www.demogr.mpg.de/). She was the Executive Director of the Rostock Center for the Study of Demographic Change (http://www.rostockerzentrum.de/), a joint research institution of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research and the University of Rostock. She completed her PhD in Demography and Statistics in 1997 at the University of Vienna. Her research focuses on patterns and trends in health, morbidity, and care need at old age. She is particularly interested in life-course factors of cognitive and physical functioning, and of neurodegenerative diseases such as dementia and Parkinson's disease.