Dr Jotheeswaran Thiyagarajan

Technical Officer (Epidemiologist)

Biography

Responsibilities:

  1. Monitoring and Evaluation of UN Decade of Healthy Ageing
  2. Development of Public Health Strategy to Prevent Fracture
  3. Implementation of WHO Global Ageing Population Survey
  4. Managing WHO Collaborating Centres working on ageing and health

Dr Jotheeswaran Amuthavalli Thiyagarajan is a Technical Officer (Epidemiologist) in the Ageing and Health Unit at WHO Headquarters. In August 2015, He joined WHO and he is currently leading three initiatives for the World Health Organization (WHO). These include efforts to monitor and evaluate the progress and impact of the UN Decade of Healthy Ageing in 194 countries, developing a public health strategy to promote bone health and prevent fractures in older persons, and implementing the WHO Global Ageing Population Survey.

Jotheeswaran is the Secretariat for the WHO Technical Advisory Group for Measurement of Healthy Ageing (TAG4MHA) and the UN Steering Committee for Monitoring Healthy Ageing.  Through these groups, WHO sets measurement agenda and global standards for measuring health and well-being of older persons. He also supervises two WHO Collaborating Centres: WHO Collaborating Center for Epidemiology of Musculoskeletal Conditions and Ageing at University of Liege, Belgium and WHO Collaborating Center for Longitudinal Studies on Ageing at University of Dublin, Ireland.

Jotheeswaran, in collaboration with several academic partners, leads research on validating WHO’s new concept of healthy ageing, mainly intrinsic capacity and functional ability.  He also leads the effort to harmonise data from all ongoing national surveys on ageing and health to produce global health estimates on older persons' health state and care needs. He also manages several experts working groups of WHO: WHO Bone Health Expert Working Group, WHO working group on quality of dying and death, WHO Working Group on Vitality Capacity, WHO Working Group on Locomotor Capacity, WHO Working Group on Cognitive Capacity and WHO Working Group on Psychological Capacity.

Jotheeswaran was a guest editor for the WHO Special Issue on Measurement of Healthy Ageing 2023, Age and Ageing (Impact factor 12.7), Oxford Journal. He was a panel member of the WHO Guideline Review Committee, between 2019 and 2023, which ensures that WHO guidelines are of high methodological quality and are developed through a transparent, evidence-based decision-making process. WHO guidelines are subject to a rigorous quality assurance process that helps to ensure that published guidelines is trustworthy, impactful and meet the highest international standards. He is a panel member of the Healthy Ageing Innovation Award issued by the International Telecommunication Union.

Jotheeswaran's expertise in ageing epidemiology, coupled with skills in statistical modelling, health systems research, systematic reviews, global health estimates, and knowledge transfer, positions him as a valuable asset in advancing policy development in this ageing and health.  

Jotheeswaran’s scientific publications can be accessed here https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7895-788X