Vegard Skirbekk is a professor at Columbia University and a senior researcher at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health. His work is focused on working towards understanding the links between aging and workers productivity with the goal of improving senior workers’ skills is critical to countries with aging populations. Dr. Skirbekk’s research in this area, which examines the relationships of skills and work performance, emphasizes how population aging – at the macro level – is influenced by more than biological age processes. Productivity measured against the biological age of a workforce is one aspect of the project; however, this is not a straightforward assessment. Countries with better educated populations, for example, tend to have older people with greater cognitive skill levels than countries whose populations are less well educated.