Professor Maria A. Fiatarone Singh

Prof Maria A. Fiatarone Singh AM, MD, FGSA, FRACP, is a a formally trained, board-certified internist and geriatrician (MD, University of California at San Diego, 1981, Internal Medicine Boston University 1984, Geriatric Medicine, UCLA 1987), and a Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America and the Royal Australasian College of Physicians. She has held the inaugural John Sutton Chair of Exercise and Sport Science, Faculty of Health Sciences, and Professorship, Sydney Medical School since 1999, with continuing appointment as Senior Research Associate at Harvard-Affiliate Hebrew Institute for Aging Research since 1987. Her research, teaching and clinical career has focused on the integration of geriatric medicine, exercise, and nutrition to improve quality of life in older adults, and she is recognised internationally for this work spanning over 35 years. She has designed and carried out many clinical trials and longitudinal studies internationally, including large multi-centre trials of exercise and chronic disease management. She has published extensively, having authored/edited 3 books and over 400 peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, position stands, and reviews, with an H-Index of 83 in 2023. She has been awarded research funding in the US and AU exceeding AUD $80 million to date. Her active clinical practice, student training, and dissemination work is carried out via her directorship of The Centre for Strong Medicine, the Strong Medicine Foundation and in the USA the Circle of Fitness and the Fit for Your Life Foundation.

Her findings have led to a paradigm shift in geriatric medicine, whereby sarcopenia is now recognized as a disease for which PRT is a potent preventive and therapeutic intervention for older adults, both fit and frail. Since that time, the target of her trials has expanded to include most of the major chronic diseases and geriatric syndromes affecting function, including mobility disorders, osteoporosis, falls, hip fracture, as well as diabetes, arthritis, obesity, depression, cognitive decline, insomnia, peripheral vascular disease, renal failure, cardiac failure, Lewy Body dementia, peripheral neuropathy, breast cancer, inflammatory bowel disease, and substance abuse disorders, among others, using both face-to-face clinic and digital/eHealth-supported delivery of multidisciplinary interventions. She designed and led the NHMRC-funded HIPFIT; the only study ever to significantly reduce nursing home admissions and death (by 84%) after hip fracture, and the NHMRC-funded SMART Study- the first RCT to show that high intensity PRT improved long-term cognitive outcomes and brain morphology in MCI. Current studies investigate lifestyle interventions to promote healthy ageing, targeting frailty and cognitive decline.