Manchester, England, United Kingdom
Tine Buffel is Professor of Sociology and Social Gerontology at the University of Manchester, where she directs the Manchester Urban Ageing Research Group (MUARG) – an interdisciplinary group bringing together scholars from sociology, geography, anthropology, political science and architecture, with an interest in understanding the relationship between population ageing and urbanisation. Tine has published widely in the field of ageing, with a particular focus on social and environmental issues associated with ageing populations. Her research career has been distinguished by a commitment to working with community partnerships to study and address equity and social justice issues. Building on a background of innovative participatory and co-production methodologies with older people, she has been particularly interested in studying questions relating to neighbourhood and community life in later life, social inequality and exclusion, urban deprivation and developing ‘age-friendly’ environments. Her research has received various prizes for its impact on policy and practice to improve the lives of older people. She is an expert member of the WHO Advisory Group on Measurement, Monitoring and Evalution of the UN Decade of Healthy Ageing and an executive board member of the British Society of Gerontology. She was the principal investigator on various grants, including an Intra-European Marie Curie Fellowship and an ESRC Future Leaders award, both of which build upon her extensive international networks and collaborations. In 2021, she was awarded a Research Leader Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust, with a 5-year project entitled 'Urbanisation and Population Ageing: Interdisciplinary perspectives on "ageing in place" in cities'. This study will provide innovative insights into the question of how urban environments can adapt to meet the needs of a growing and increasingly diverse ageing population, drawing upon an interdisciplinary and mixed-methods approach involving fieldwork in seven cities across the world. Before coming to the University of Manchester in 2012, Tine was a PhD student, Research associate and more recently lecturer in Educational Sciences at the Free University of Brussels (VUB). She holds an honorary position at VUB, where she continues to develop joint work with colleagues involved in the Belgian Ageing Studies. Webpages and a full list of publications: https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/tine.buffel.html https://manchester.academia.edu/TineBuffel https://www.micra.manchester.ac.uk/muarg/