Carl V. Hill (Alzheimer’s Association)
Carl V. Hill, Ph.D., MPH, is currently serving as interim chief diversity and inclusion officer for the Alzheimer’s Association, overseeing strategic initiatives to strengthen the Association’s outreach to all populations, providing communities with resources and support to address the Alzheimer’s crisis. He is also the Association’s vice president, Scientific Engagement. In this role, he leads strategic efforts to create global awareness of the Association’s international research program.
Heather Whitson (Duke University Medical Center)
Dr. Whitson’s research is focused on improving care options and resilience for people with multiple chronic conditions. In particular, she has interest and expertise related to how comorbidities and biological aging affect the brain. Dr. Whitson is the Director of the Duke Center for the Study of Aging & Human Development (aka Duke Aging Center). She also co-Directs the Duke University and the University of North Carolina Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (Duke/UNC ADRC), an NIH ADRC with a bold vision to transform dementia care and research across Eastern North Carolina. The scientific theme of the Duke/UNC ADRC is to understand factors across the lifespan that contribute to the development, progression, or experience of Alzheimer’s disease.
Dennis Tolley (Brigham Young University)
For more than 50 years, Dennis Tolley has pursued a distinguished career in the statistics of health and health care costs. He authored numerous peer-reviewed publications in a variety of areas (including epidemiology, demography, parasitology, geology, physics, statistical science, actuarial science, and analytic chemistry) and has worked with researchers at the World Health Organization, IIASA (Vienna), the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank. Dr. Tolley joined the BYU Department of Statistics faculty, setting in motion efforts that would eventually be formalized into the BYU Actuarial Program. In recognition of the outstanding efforts and contributions to the BYU Actuarial Program and to the actuarial profession by Statistics faculty member, Dr. Dennis Tolley, the BYU Actuarial Advisory Board has created the Dennis Tolley Recognition Award.
Rima Kaddurah-Daouk (Duke University School of Medicine)
Dr. Rima Kaddurah-Daouk is a Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Medicine at Duke University. She is a seminal force in the development of applications for metabolomics in the medical field. She co-founded the Metabolomics Society, helping create a presence and voice for an interactive metabolomics community, established Metabolomics, a leading journal for the field, and co-founded Metabolon, a leading biotechnology company for applications in metabolomics along with two other biotechnology companies. With significant NIH funding (over $80 million over the past 15 years), she established and leads large consortia (more than 120 scientists from over 30 institutions). The NIMH-funded Mood Disorder Precision Medicine Consortium (MDPMC) seeks to optimize treatment outcomes in depression. The Alzheimer’s Disease Metabolomics Consortium (ADMC)’s mission, funded by the NIA, was created to respond to the ‘National Plan to Address Alzheimer’s Disease’ to treat or prevent AD . The Alzheimer Gut Microbiome Project includes leadership from the gut microbiome, AD, depression, and metabolomics fields with a mission to define a possible role for gut microbiome in AD and other neuropsychiatric diseases. Earlier work funded by the NIGMS through the Pharmacometabolomics Research Network established foundations for “Pharmacometabolomics”, which parallels and informs pharmacogenomics in which an individual’s metabolic profiles is used to inform about treatment outcomes. She is establishing foundations for a global virtual institute for precision health where the metabolome captures net influences of genome, gut microbiome, exposome and diet influences where big data can inform about health of individual’s in real time.
Murali Doraiswamy (Duke University School of Medicine)
Murali Doraiswamy MBBS FRCP is Professor of Psychiatry and Professor in Medicine at Duke University School of Medicine where he is a highly cited physician scientist at the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Duke Center for the Study of Aging and an Affiliate Faculty at the Duke Center for Precision Medicine and Applied Genomics as well as the Duke Microbiome Center. He directs a clinical trials unit that has been involved in the development of many modern diagnostic tests, apps, algorithms, and therapeutics in wide use today. Prof Doraiswamy has been an advisor to leading government agencies, businesses and advocacy groups including the NIH, FDA, and WHO as well as numerous life science companies.
Michelle M. Mielke (Wake Forest University)
Dr. Mielke works as a translational epidemiologist to identify fluid and neuroimaging biomarkers for the diagnosis, prediction and/or progression of neurodegenerative diseases. Much of her work has emphasized the utility of blood-based lipids, especially the role of sphingolipids (ceramides and sphingomyelins). In relation to Parkinson’s disease, she is currently examining plasma ceramides and glucosylceramides as potential biomarkers of cognitive and functional progression. Dr. Mielke has more than 80 peer-reviewed publications and is the PI of several NIH- and Foundation-funded clinical- and epidemiological-based grants.
Thomas Karikari (University of Gothenburg & University of Pittsburgh)
Dr. Karikari is an Assistant Professor. His research aims to further understand the molecular and biochemical basis of pathological brain changes that occur in Alzheimer’s patients, and to apply this knowledge to develop new biofluid-based diagnostic tools for clinical use. As a postdoctoral scholar, Dr. Karikari developed the most widely used and reliable blood test for Alzheimer’s disease to date, which reliably quantifies blood p-tau across all age groups to enable diagnosis and prognosis. In the Department of Psychiatry, he serves as director of the Mass Spectrometry Biomarker Laboratory and of the Single Molecule Array (SIMOA) Biomarker Program. He collaborates with multiple Pitt Psychiatry investigators in the field of Alzheimer’s disease research and leads the Fluid Biomarker Core of the recently renewed National Institute on Aging Alzheimer’s Program Project Grant.
Mathias Arnold (Helmholtz University and Duke University)
Dr. Arnold is a Research Team Leader for Computational Neurobiology at Helmholtz Munich and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke University. He received his PhD in computational biology from the Technical University Munich. Dr. Arnold’s research focuses on metabolic underpinnings of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) pathogenesis that he interfaces with genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and gut microbiome data for fine mapping of disease-relevant pathways. Primary applications of the derived publicly available network-based multi-omics Atlas for AD are the identification of novel biomarkers, prioritization of potential therapeutic targets, and development of computational drug repositioning approaches for AD.
Nicholas J. Bishop (University of Arizona)
Dr. Bishop’s research examines the progression of complex age-related health conditions and seeks to identify risk and protective factors contributing to health disparities in aging populations. Currently his work focuses on population trends in multimorbidity and much of his research has examined the interrelation between cognitive decline, progressive physical disablement, and multimorbidity. Previously he has sought to identify potentially modifiable points of intervention in the progression of chronic disease, specifically examining food insecurity and dietary intake. In non-academic professional roles he has led multidisciplinary teams resulting in high-impact applied research on population health and education. His primary goal is to contribute to research that will inform clinical practice and policy development through identification of emergent health trends in our expanding and increasingly diverse aging population.
Yolanda Barron (VNS Health)
Yolanda Barrón, M.S. is a Senior Biostatistician with over 20 years of statistical consulting experience and has worked in home health care (HHC) since 2011 at the Center for Home Care Policy & Research at VNS Health. She is part of the team of Dr. Miriam Ryvicker and Dr. Maxim Topaz that developed an Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD) risk algorithm that incorporates clinical concepts extracted from clinicians’ notes using natural language processing (NLP) that will be used in identifying home health care patients potentially at-risk of receiving a new ADRD diagnosis within 2 years, as well as the study examining “A Longitudinal Network Study of Alzheimer’s and Dementia Care in Relation to Disparities in Access and Outcomes”. She has applied diverse survival analysis techniques (time varying coefficients and competing risks) to explore the association of the information extracted from clinical notes on new ADRD diagnoses on patients admitted to home health care, and existing differences by sex and race. She also has ample experience working in studies exploring the importance of the timing of home health care and physicians’ visits in patients admitted to home health care after a hospitalization due to heart failure and sepsis on 30-day rehospitalizations using CMS data.
Gabriele Doblhammer (Rostock University)
Prof. Dr. Gabriele Doblhammer is a Professor of Empirical Methods in Social Science and Demography, Executive Director of the Rostock Center for the Study of Demographic Change, University of Rostock and Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany.
Orna Intrator (University of Rochester)
Dr. Intrator’s VA research focuses on Veteran’s use of nursing homes and health care programs in the community across health care systems (VA, Medicare and Medicaid) and the quality of care delivered, with particular attention to the implications for health policies and organizational management. Dr. Intrator is currently examining the system-wide impact of provision of personal care services, GeriPACT and Home-Based Primary Care. Since 2012, Dr. Intrator has been developing GECDAC as a data and analytic resource to the VA Center Office of Geriatrics & Extended Care (GEC), developing measures and standardized datasets, conducting evaluations, as well as enriching the community of researchers by providing access to many of these resources. In developing the GECDAC data infrastructure. Dr. Intrator extended the Residential History File (RHF) methodology to include input from VA provided or paid utilization in addition to Medicare and Medicaid claims and nursing home resident assessments.
Igor Akushevich (Duke University, Social Science Research Institute)
Igor Akushevich, PhD, is a Research Professor at the Biodemography Research Unit of the Social Science Research Institute. His expertise includes a biodemography, epidemiology, causal methods, and advanced statistical modeling of health effects with specific focus on health disparities, cognitive disorders, and multimorbidity in older US adults. His current research is focused on quantitative evaluation of the mechanisms underlying disease-specific time trends and racial and geographic disparities in Alzheimer’s disease and related dementia, impacts of clinic-related factors and social determinants to these trends, as well as on leveraging existing and developing new approaches to large population-based data analysis.
Jonah B. Gelbach (University of California, Berkeley)
Jonah B. Gelbach is the Herman F. Selvin Professor of Law at Berkeley Law. He has both a JD and a Ph.D. in economics. His scholarship includes publications in statistical methodology, empirical labor and public economics, and various areas of law, including civil procedure, evidence, statutory interpretation, and the econometrics of securities litigation. Gelbach is a former member of the Board of Directors of the American Law and Economics Association and has served on the editorial board for the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization. He has worked as an informal pro bono consultant on the design of the juror selection system for the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, as an independent consultant to the Administrative Conference of the United States, for which he co-authored a study of disability appeals to the federal district courts, and as an econometrics expert in litigation involving employment discrimination and securities fraud.
Jie Chen (University of Maryland)
Dr. Chen’s research fields include health care disparities, health care delivery system and policy, behavioral health, aging and economic evaluation. She directs the Hospital And Public health interdisciPlinarY research (HAPPY) Lab which uses a multidisciplinary perspective and involves collaboration with clinical leaders, community partners and organizational decision-makers. Her current research focuses on the integration of healthcare organizations, promoting behavioral health of vulnerable populations and mental health among older adults.
Arseniy Yashkin (Duke University, Social Science Research Institute)
Arseniy Yashkin has a rich background in the fields of public health, health economics, and health services research, with over 10 years of experience of working with survey and administrative data including Medicare 5% claims, Medicare 5% Part D, the National Long Term Care Survey (NLTCS), the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS), The Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results Medicare-linked data (SEER-M), the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS), and a self-compiled database based on information drawn from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS).
Hyunkyung (Yulia) Yun (Brown University)
Hyunkyung (Yulia) Yun is a PhD Student in the Department of Health Services, Policy & Practice at Brown University School of Public Health. She has been working at the National Health Insurance Services in South Korea for over 8 years as a project manager and a research analyst for the national long-term care insurance system. Her research interests focus on evaluating policy and delivery systems for older adults, especially those in the nursing home setting with dementia. She examined the impact of clinician discontinuity on health outcomes and costs among nursing home residents, the performance of private equity-owned nursing homes during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the role of the physicians specializing in nursing facilities, utilizing both quantitative and qualitative methods. Currently, her research falls under two themes: (1) analyzing electronic medical records collected from nursing homes to detect neuropsychiatric symptoms among residents and examining structural disparities in the use of EMR, and (2) examining the trends of the Medicare Advantage growth among the nursing home population and the quality of the encounter data. She also led a study recently that examined the cost-effectiveness of the magnetic resonance imaging-guided biopsy for prostate cancer detection among Medicare beneficiaries, which involved an interdisciplinary research team across the areas of health economics, radiology, and urology.
Sandra Shi (Harvard University)
Sandra Shi, MD, MPH, is an Instructor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Assistant Scientist at the Hinda and Arthur Marcus Institute at Hebrew SeniorLife. She is a current R03 GEMSSTAR awardee and NIA Butler-Williams Schola. She researches frailty and patient-centered post-acute care outcomes with a focus on skilled nursing facilities. Her work leverages large databases including nationally representative surveys and Medicare claims. She has also conducted prospective cohorts examining quality of life and physical recovery during and after rehabilitation. Her ultimate goal is to create interventions that can holistically optimize functional recovery for older adults by combining geriatrics and rehabilitation sciences to enhance post-acute rehabilitation.
Olga Jarrín Montaner (Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey)
Olga F. Jarrín Montaner, PhD, RN, FAAN is a tenured Associate Professor in the School of Nursing and Director of the Community Health and Aging Outcomes Laboratory in the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research at Rutgers. Her research interests center around solving problems in our public health and healthcare systems to improve health equity and access to health services across the lifespan, with a focus on older adults living with dementia and their caregivers. She currently leads two projects funded by the National Institute on Aging that use national Medicare data. The first project (R01) aims to improve the quality of end-of-life care provided to families and people living with Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias by generating population-level evidence on the public health impact of community-based support structures including skilled home health care and home hospice. The second project (R33) focuses on describing and predicting clinical aging trajectories of cognitive and functional status, geriatric syndromes, health services use, as a function of shared risks including exposure to air pollution and socioeconomic deprivation in both urban and rural communities. Dr. Jarrín is a fellow in the American Academy of Nursing and recognized as a Distinguished Educator in Gerontological Nursing by the National Hartford Center of Gerontological Nursing Excellence.
Kate Bundorf (Duke University)
Professor Bundorf’s research focuses on health policy and the economics of health care systems. She has studied public and private health insurance markets, the organization of health care providers, and consumer decision making in health care. Prior to joining the faculty at Duke, Professor Bundorf was an associate professor of health research and policy at the Stanford University School of Medicine. She is also a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Bundorf received her MBA and MPH from The University of California at Berkeley and her PhD from The Wharton School. She was a Fulbright Lecturer at Fudan School of Public Health in Shanghai, China during 2009 and 2010. Her research has been published in leading economic and health policy journals and has received funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She received the 13th Annual Health Care Research Award from The National Institute for Health Care Management in 2007.
Monica Rivera Mindt (Fordham University)
Dr. Rivera-Mindt is nationally and internationally recognized for her research accomplishments and expertise in brain health equity, cultural neuropsychology, and community-engaged research (CER) methods. She is a Professor of Psychology, Latino/a/x/e Studies, and African & African American Studies at Fordham University with a joint appointment as a Professor of Neurology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and a board-certified neuropsychologist. The overarching aim of her work is to characterize and understand brain health inequities in cognitive aging to inform culturally responsive, evidence-based interventions and policies geared towards improving brain health outcomes among minoritized, underrepresented populations. Her research and leadership have led to fundamental changes in the field of neuropsychology through the evidence base that she has helped to create and her leadership in helping to translate this evidence into a broader understanding of the critical roles of sociocultural and structural factors in brain-behavior relationships in neuropsychological training, research, and practice with underrepresented populations.
Lisa Wiese (Florida Atlantic University)
Lisa Wiese, PhD, RN, PHNA-BC, CNE, Associate Professor, was inspired to study Alzheimer’s disease. (AD) after her own mother, a former coal mine executive in West Virginia, was diagnosed with the illness. The primary care provider prescribed medications, despite some controversy as to their effectiveness, and Lisa’s mother was able to avoid institutionalization until she died seven years later. Dr. Wiese states, “I want to help people who are at risk of AD to be aware of the importance of early diagnosis and treatment. This provides them, the opportunity to make lifestyle changes that may delay disease onset or progression, receive treatment for symptoms and other illnesses that may exacerbate the illness, and plan for future care needs, so they can age in place and have a greater quality of life.”
Alisa Adhikari (Duke University School of Medicine)
Alisa Adhikari BS is a pre-med trainee and clinical research specialist in the Neurocognitive Disorders Program in the Department of Psychiatry at Duke University. She is currently researching the utility of the Environmental Justice Index as a measure of health inequity and evaluating its impact on Mild Cognitive Impairment progression.
Arnold R. Eiser (University of Pennsylvania)
Arnold R. Eiser, MD is an Adjunct Member, Environmental Neuroscience Group, Center for Excellence in Environmental Toxicology (CEET), and Senior Scholar, Penn Center for Public Health, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, and a Master of the American College of Physicians. He is also an Associate Editor of the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease and a reviewer for many neuroscience journals. He published and spoken nationally and internationally on Alzheimer’s Disease is a Multi-System Disorder. He is the author of Preserving Brain Health in a Toxic Age: New Insights from Neuroscience, Integrative Medicine, and Public Health, (Rowman & Littlefield 2021) as well as the Ethos of Medicine in Postmodern America: Philosophical, Cultural and Social Considerations(Rowman & Littlefield, 2014). He is the recipient of the Parker Palmer Courage to Lead Award from the ACGME and the Laureate Award from the PA Chapter of the American College of Physicians.
Julia Kravchenko (Duke University School of Medicine)
Julia Kravchenko (a.k.a. Krauchanka), MD, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Surgery, Duke University School of Medicine. Her research interests include geographic and racial disparities in morbidity and mortality in the United States, comorbidities and multimorbidity in older adults, health outcomes in underserved populations, and health impacts of environment injustice. Her current studies are focused on a quantitative evaluation of contributions of disease-specific incidence rates and patient survival to dynamics of disease prevalence and mortality, and clarification of the role of clinic- (e.g., the use of specific treatments, treatment choice and adherence to treatment, and utilization of screening and diagnostic procedures) and non-clinic- (e.g., socioeconomic determinants, behavioral factors, environmental characteristics, and access to and quality of medical care) related factors in disparities in morbidity, mortality, and life expectancy in the United States.
Mustafa Husain (UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas)
Dr. Mustafa Husain, MD, is currently tenured Professor of Psychiatry Neurology and Internal Medicine, Director of the Neuro-Stimulation Research Lab, and Chief of the Geriatric Psychiatry Division at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. Until recently he was Vice Chair for Faculty development at Duke University School of Medicine, Durham NC. He received his initial training in the United States at Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA. He completed his residency at the USC and continued his research and geriatric fellowships at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, NC. Dr. Husain is involved in training, education, and research in aging related neuropsychiatric disorders and geriatric issues. Dr Husain has published numerous peer-reviewed articles in national and international scientific journals, authored several book chapters. Dr Husain have received several Foundation and NIH grants focused on Neuropsychiatric Disorders. He has served as Grant Reviewer on NIH study sections and prestigious Welcome Trust, London, UK.
Kristine Yaffe (University of California San Francisco)
Dr. Yaffe is the Scola Endowed Chair and Epstein Endowed Chair, Professor and Vice Chair of Psychiatry, Neurology, and Epidemiology, and Director of the Center for Population Brain Health at the University of California, San Francisco. She is an internationally recognized expert in the epidemiology of dementia and cognitive aging. Dr. Yaffe serves as PI of almost a dozen NIH, Department of Defense, Veterans Administration, and foundation grants and is the foremost leader in identifying modifiable risk factors for dementia. Dr. Yaffe and her colleagues were the first to determine that potentially 30% of dementia risk is preventable. More recently, her research group has led work on the connections between cognitive aging and cardiovascular risk factors, traumatic brain injury, sleep disorders, life course exposures, health disparities, and social determinants of health. With over 700 peer-reviewed articles dedicated to improving population brain health (H-index=168), her work has formed the cornerstone for dementia prevention trials worldwide. In recognition of these groundbreaking accomplishments. Dr. Yaffe has received several prestigious honors including the American Academy of Neurology’s Potamkin Prize for Alzheimer’s Research in 2017, election to the National Academy of Medicine in 2019, the NIH Robert S. Gordon, Jr. Award in Epidemiology in 2021, and the Department of Veterans Affairs John B. Barnwell Award for Achievement in Clinical Research in 2022.
Yewande Akinbami (Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute)
Yewande Akinbami, M.D., MPH, is a senior program officer in the Clinical Comparative Effectiveness Research unit at PCORI and a physician by training. She co-leads and directs the older adult work group that is responsible for all older adult initiatives and related funding opportunities at PCORI. She currently manages a diverse portfolio on healthy aging, delirium and chronic disease management. Prior to joining PCORI, she worked as a primary care physician and served as a program director overseeing several multicenter clinical trials at the Center for Clinical Trials, Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University. She holds a Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS) from the College of Medicine, University of Ibadan, Master of Public Health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and is a current DrPH student at the Milken School of Public Health, George Washington University.
Richard Kwok (National Institute on Aging)
Dr. Richard Kwok is a Program Director for the Population Studies and Genetics Branch of the Division of Neuroscience at the National Institute on Aging. Dr. Kwok is an environmental epidemiologist with experience in multi-site epidemiologic studies of chronic disease outcomes across the life span. His interests span the environmental health sciences from exposure assessment and personal dosimetry to biomonitoring and the exposome as it applies to Alzheimer’s Disease and related dementias and its precursors across the life course. He is involved in number of trans-NIH and interagency working groups on a range of topics including: large data harmonization and common data elements efforts; climate change; disasters and wildfires; and the All of Us Research Program.
Roland J. Thorpe (Johns Hopkins University)
Roland J. Thorpe, Jr., PhD, MS, is a gerontologist and social epidemiologist with nationally-recognized expertise in minority aging, men’s health, and place-based disparities. He holds joint appointments in medicine and in neurology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He is an associate professor of health, behavior and society at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He serves as the director of the Program for Research on Men’s Health at the Hopkins Center for Health Disparities Solutions. Dr. Thorpe is a member of the Advisory Committee on Minority Health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
