Aubrey David Nicholas Jasper de Grey (dəˈgreɪ; born 20 April 1963) is an English author and biomedical gerontologist. He is the author of The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging (1999) and co-author of Ending Aging (2007). He is known for his view that medical technology may enable human beings alive today not to die from age-related causes. As an amateur mathematician, he has contributed to the study of the Hadwiger–Nelson problem in geometric graph theory, making the first progress on the problem in over 60 years.
De Grey is an international adjunct professor of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, a fellow of the Gerontological Society of America, the American Aging Association, and the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. He has been interviewed in recent years in a number of news sources, including CBS 60 Minutes, the BBC, The Guardian, Fortune Magazine, The Washington Post, TED, Popular Science, Playboy, The Colbert Report, Time, the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, and The Joe Rogan Experience. He was the Chief Science Officer of the SENS Research Foundation, but was fired in August 2021 after allegedly interfering in a probe investigating sexual harassment allegations against him. In late 2022, de Grey co-founded Longevity Escape Velocity Foundation as President and Chief Science Officer.
De Grey was born and brought up in London, England. He told The Observer that he never knew his father, and that his mother Cordelia, an artist, encouraged him in the areas in which she herself was weakest: science and mathematics. De Grey was educated at Sussex House School and Harrow School. He attended university at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, graduating with a BA in computer science in 1985.
After graduation in 1985, de Grey joined Sinclair Research as an artificial intelligence researcher and software engineer. In 1986, along with SRL colleague Aaron Turner, he co-founded Man-Made Minions Ltd. in order to pursue the development of an automated formal program verifier.