Aubrey de Grey has spent a quarter-century arguing — and increasingly proving — that aging is an engineering problem, not an inevitability. He created the SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) framework in 2000, co-founded the Methuselah Foundation, and built the Methuselah Mouse Prize, which has helped produce the longest-lived laboratory mouse on record. He now leads the LEV Foundation, pursuing what he calls “longevity escape velocity” — the point at which medical progress adds years to life faster than time takes them away.

A Cambridge-trained computer scientist turned biologist, he authored the field-defining book Ending Aging and edited the journal Rejuvenation Research for nearly two decades. In a twist that surprised even his own field, he also solved a 60-year-old open problem in geometric graph theory — the Hadwiger–Nelson problem — proving that curiosity, wherever it’s pointed, tends to pay off.