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Staff Profile

Dr Andrew Kingston

Senior Lecturer: Epidemiology of Ageing

  • Telephone: +44 (0) 191 208 1112
  • Address: Population Health Sciences Institute (PHSI), Faculty of Medical Science
    Newcastle University, Health Innovation Neighbourhood, 
    Rm 107 Biogerontology Building, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE4 5PL
Background

Background

I am a statistical epidemiologist specialising in ageing, multimorbidity, disability, care need and health inequalities. I hold Chartered Statistician status with the Royal Statistical Society, Senior Fellowship of Advance HE, and a PhD in epidemiology and statistics.

My work focuses on using advanced quantitative methods to analyse complex longitudinal data and understand how health changes across later life. I am particularly interested in how people move into and through states of multimorbidity, disability, frailty, dependency and care need, and how these trajectories are shaped by socioeconomic position, place, lifestyle, disease burden and wider determinants of health.

A central part of my work is methodological. I develop and apply statistical approaches for repeated measures, categorical and continuous longitudinal outcomes, health expectancy estimation, and microsimulation. This includes the development and application of PACSim, the Population Ageing and Care Simulation model, which projects future health trajectories, multimorbidity, disability and care demand in ageing populations.

My research is designed to generate evidence that is not only statistically rigorous, but also useful for policy, planning and practice. This includes work on healthy life expectancy, disability-free life expectancy, frailty-free life expectancy, healthy working life expectancy, ageing in place, social care need, and regional and socioeconomic inequalities in later life.

Vision

My research vision is to understand how ageing trajectories are formed, how inequalities accumulate across the life course, and how policy, prevention and service design can improve later-life health.

In particular, I aim to:

  • identify the biological, social, behavioural, environmental and economic pathways that shape multimorbidity, disability, frailty and care need;
  • understand how life-course exposures influence health trajectories and inequalities in older age;
  • develop methods that allow us to project future health, care demand and dependency with greater precision;
  • use microsimulation and digital-twin approaches to test plausible futures, intervention scenarios and policy choices;
  • support the compression of morbidity and dependency, so that people spend a greater proportion of later life in good health and a shorter period living with severe disability or high care need;
  • strengthen the evidence base for healthy ageing policy, prevention, service planning and independent living.

At the centre of this work is a simple aim: to help people live longer, healthier lives, with fewer years spent in poor health, disability or dependency.

Professional associations, esteem indicators and prizes

  • Chartered Statistician, Royal Statistical Society.
  • Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society.
  • Senior Fellow of Advance HE.
  • Fellow of Newcastle University Policy Academy.
  • University Partner Governor, Cumbria, Northumberland, Tyne and Wear NHS Foundation Trust.
  • Visiting Fellow, Australian National University (2018-2020)
  • External Specialist Advisor, University of Dundee Online MPH.
  • International research collaborator, Nova Scotia Centre on Aging, Mount Saint Vincent University, Canada.
  • International research collaborator, Ageing and Life Course Lab, Academia Sinica, Taiwan.
  • Invited podcast guest, The Lancet Healthy Longevity.
  • Invited keynote speaker, New Zealand Ageing and Gerontology Conference.
  • Invited author of the epidemiology of ageing chapter in Brocklehurst’s Textbook of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology.
  • Finalist, edie Awards 2025, for the Homes for Living programme with Newcastle University and E.ON.
  • Dhole-Eddlestone Memorial Prize for the strongest paper published in Age and Ageing in 2019, for work using PACSim to project multimorbidity in the older population of England.
  • Reviewer for major national and international funders, including NIHR, MRC, Wellcome Trust, Alzheimer’s Society and NIHR Academy awards.

Management and leadership

I hold several strategic leadership roles across research, education and institutional governance.

These include:

  • Co-Director for Education, Population Health Sciences Institute.
  • Degree Programme Director, Master of Public Health.
  • Ageing and Geroscience Theme Lead, Population Health Sciences Institute.
  • REF 2029 Epidemiology Discipline Lead, Unit of Assessment 3.
  • Co-Director, Newcastle University Centre of Research Excellence in Mobility and Transport.
  • Co-Lead, Transport and Health theme within the Mobility and Transport NUCoRE.
  • Chair, Newcastle 85+ Study Data Guardians.
  • Member, Newcastle University Information Governance Steering Group.

Through these roles, I contribute to curriculum transformation, research strategy, data governance, interdisciplinary collaboration, and the development of Newcastle’s ageing, epidemiology and population health profile.


  


Research

My research focuses on the epidemiology of ageing, with a particular emphasis on disability, multimorbidity, healthy life expectancy, care need and inequalities in later life. I use complex longitudinal data, advanced statistical methods and microsimulation to understand how health changes over time and how population ageing will shape future demand for health and care.

My main research interests include:

  • understanding pathways into disability, dependency, multimorbidity and care need in older people;
  • examining how disability and multimorbidity are shaped by life-course exposures, socioeconomic position, place and wider determinants of health;
  • developing and applying methods for calculating health expectancies, including disability-free life expectancy, frailty-free life expectancy and healthy working life expectancy;
  • using microsimulation and digital-twin approaches to project future prevalence, incidence and care demand, particularly for multimorbidity, disability and dependency;
  • developing PACSim, the Population Ageing and Care Simulation model, as a platform for projecting ageing trajectories, care need and intervention scenarios;
  • understanding regional and socioeconomic inequalities in healthy ageing, including the long-term consequences of the north–south health divide in England;
  • investigating ageing in place, independent living, social care need and the environments that support or restrict healthy ageing;
  • exploring the drivers of the male–female disability-survival paradox;
  • supporting comparative and international ageing research using harmonised longitudinal datasets.

I am an investigator on several major research programmes, including:

  • Newcastle University Principal Investigator for a £2.5m NIHR Programme Grant for Applied Research focused on healthy ageing, inequalities and care demand.
  • Co-investigator on the NIHR Healthy Ageing Policy Research Unit, where I contribute methodological leadership on health expectancies, inequalities, multimorbidity, disability and future health and care need.
  • Co-investigator on the Legal & General Advanced Care Research Centre, contributing to work on ageing in place, care trajectories and the conditions that enable people to remain in the place they consider home.
  • Newcastle University Principal Investigator for the Innovate UK Healthy Ageing Trailblazer, Homes for Living, an £11.4m cross-sector programme with E.ON developing and evaluating in-home solutions to support independent living.
  • Co-investigator on the Newcastle 85+ Study, a landmark longitudinal study of health, ageing, disability, multimorbidity, care and survival among people aged 85 and over.
  • Co-investigator on the Wellcome Trust-funded North and South: Regional Health Inequalities in England study, examining long-term and deep-rooted regional inequalities in health.
  • Newcastle University lead for work on extending working lives for people with musculoskeletal conditions, including the development and application of healthy working life expectancy methods.
  • Collaborator on international ageing studies and consortia, including work with partners in New Zealand, Canada, Taiwan and other ageing research networks.

My wider leadership roles include:

  • Ageing and Geroscience Theme Lead for Newcastle University’s Population Health Sciences Institute.
  • Co-Director of the Newcastle University Centre of Research Excellence in Mobility and Transport, where I co-lead work linking transport, place and health.
  • Chair of the Newcastle 85+ Study Data Guardians, supporting responsible governance of one of the UK’s major ageing data assets.
  • Member of the Office for National Statistics Expert Advisory Group on health projections and health-related population modelling.
  • Former expert policy advisor to the New Zealand Ministry of Health, providing methodological and policy advice on healthy ageing.
  • UK lead/collaborator in international longitudinal ageing research, including comparative work using harmonised data to understand ageing trajectories across countries.


My recent work has contributed to publications in leading journals, including The Lancet, The Lancet Public Health, The Lancet Healthy Longevity, PLOS Medicine, Age and Ageing, BMC Medicine and Social Science & Medicine. My research has also informed policy-facing work on healthy ageing, inequalities and care demand, including the Ageing in the North report launched at the House of Lords






Teaching

Education and supervision

I serve as Co-Director for Education in the Population Health Sciences Institute and Degree Programme Director for the Master of Public Health. In these roles, I provide strategic leadership across the Institute’s education portfolio, with responsibility for programme development, curriculum design, assessment coherence, quality assurance and innovation in public health teaching and learning.

I led the 2025 redesign of the Master of Public Health, strengthening its focus on applied epidemiology, data science, quantitative methods, ageing, inequalities and real-world public health decision-making. I am also contributing to the development of the NU Online MPH and to population health teaching within the Biomedical Sciences curriculum.

My current teaching and module leadership includes:

  • Applied Epidemiology and Data Science — MPH8006
  • Ageing Across the Life Course — MPH8007
  • Epidemiology — BMS3023

Across my teaching, I aim to help students understand how epidemiological evidence, statistical thinking and public health decision-making connect in practice. My teaching draws directly on my research in ageing, multimorbidity, health expectancy, inequalities and simulation modelling.

I have supervised several PhD students to completion and continue to supervise doctoral, postgraduate taught and undergraduate research projects, including PhD, MD, MSc, MSci, MRes, MPH, MPharm and Biomedical Sciences dissertations. My supervision focuses on supporting students to develop rigorous, policy-relevant and methodologically robust research.

I welcome enquiries from prospective PhD students interested in quantitative and interdisciplinary approaches to ageing, multimorbidity, disability, health inequalities, care need, health expectancy methods, microsimulation and population health research.

Publications