Thomas T. Perls, a School of Medicine professor, will be honored in November by the Gerontological Society of America (GSA) for his stewardship of the New England Centenarian Study (NECS). Perls will receive the 2016 Joseph T. Freeman Award at the GSA’s annual scientific meeting in New Orleans.

The NECS is the longest-running and largest study of centenarians, their siblings, and their offspring in the world. It originated with a focus on Alzheimer’s disease and includes more than 500 semi-supercentenarians (ages 105 to 109 years) and 150 supercentenarians (ages 110 to 119 years).

Perls is also the principal investigator of the National Institute on Aging–funded multicenter Long Life Family Study, a longitudinal study, established in 2006, of nearly 5,000 participants belonging to families demonstrating rare clustering for survival to extreme old age.

The GSA’s Joseph T. Freeman Award is given annually to a prominent physician in the field of aging who is a member of the society’s health sciences section. The recipient traditionally presents a lecture at the next annual scientific meeting, which will take place in July 2017 at the GSA-hosted World Congress of Gerontology and Geriatrics in San Francisco, Calif.
Perls sits on the editorial boards of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society and the Journal of Gerontology: Medical Sciences, and he is a federal advisory board member for the National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic and Other Populations of the US Census Bureau. He is also a vocal critic of the antiaging industry, particularly its medical and legal misuse of growth hormone, testosterone, and other drugs for “antiaging,” and has published extensively on the subject as well as testified before Congress. He is the author of two educational websites, the Living to 100 life expectancy calculator and www.hghwatch.com, which focuses on growth hormone use in anti-aging and sports.

Perls received his geriatrics training at Mount Royal Hospital in Melbourne, Australia, and Harvard Medical School, and earned a master’s degree in public health at Harvard. He is a fellow of the American College of Physicians. He is also a senior physician in geriatrics and cares for patients at Boston Medical Center, the primary teaching hospital for MED.