Healthy ageing is essential to prevent overburdening health care facilities and to capture the potential of an increasingly older population. Since 2001, commitments to achieving healthy ageing have featured heavily in government policy and directives. However, almost 20 years later, healthy ageing for all remains elusive. As a consequence, we have an urgent duty to reduce lifestyle-linked chronic ill health, if we are to enable healthy ageing for all. To deliver the goal of increasing healthy, active ageing, we must first understand what causes ageing, if we are to develop means to influence the processes. To achieve this goal, we need to study the ageing process in order to determine, manipulate and model functional, physiological, cellular and molecular adaptations with age. Using cellular (human skeletal muscle stem cells and C2C12 muscle cells), molecular, biochemical and human (age, exercise, disuse and cancer populations) intervention studies, it has been a career goal to develop useful, adoptable, translatable models to understand aspects of mal/adaptation with age. The purpose of this presentation will be to provide oversight of the work undertaken and career pathway followed to facilitate questions, challenge dogmas and enable collaborations in the highly important field of healthy ageing.