Brian Beach

Dr Brian Beach joined Karolinska Institutet in April 2024 in the Division of Insurance Medicine at the Department of Clinical Neuroscience. He also holds a position as Senior Research Fellow in Social Policy and Gerontology at University College London (UCL) in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, where he has been a member of the research team for the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing since July 2021.

Prior to UCL, Brian worked for eight years at the International Longevity Centre UK (ILC), where he conducted research on a range of topics related to population ageing. He has worked in the field of ageing since 2006 and has been an active member on various strategic and advisory groups with universities, businesses, the voluntary sector, and governments as they examine older people and the world of work. His engagement with the UK Parliament included three appearances before Select Committees, providing oral evidence on employment in later life and housing for older people.

Brian received his doctorate in 2016 from the University of Oxford, studying at the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, where he explored how the concept of employability plays a role in the labour market behaviour of older workers in England and other European social policy contexts. Prior to this, he worked in the International Affairs office of AARP in Washington, DC, where he helped organise a number of international dialogues and conferences on issues related to population ageing. His work also included fostering AARP’s on-going collaboration with the United Nations Programme on Ageing, conducting outreach among the diplomatic and research communities.

Prior to his position at AARP, he completed the TransAtlantic Masters Program in Political Science through the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and L’Università degli Studi di Siena, Italy. Through this programme, he gained extensive knowledge on European Union institutions, the process of European integration, and European welfare states.

Brian's research examines the intersections between ageing and policy, with emphasis on the dynamics related to work, retirement, and health. He has conducted further research on a range of topics relevant for an ageing society, including loneliness, specialist retirement housing, cognition/dementia, reforms to public pension systems, and policy efforts to stimulate longer/fuller working lives.

In his role at KI, he will explore associations among the receipt of sickness absence/disability pension, working conditions, and cognition/dementia.

Brian's posts at KI and UCL are both research-focused. He led a module on Population Ageing as part of the BSc in Population Health at UCL in recent years. He also supervises UCL students on their dissertations for the MSc in Social Epidemiology.