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Biography:
I am an Assistant Adjunct Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at UC San Diego and a the Center for Behavior Genetics of Aging. I am trained in cognitive neuroscience and have extensive experience employing cognitive testing, neuroimaging, biomarkers, and genetic measures to study Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and aging. I received my doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley under Arthur Shimamura, where I focused on the role of the parietal cortex in memory processes using functional MRI. Following graduate school, I completed a post-doctoral position at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory under William Jagust studying the effects of beta-amyloid on brain and cognition using MRI and amyloid-PET imaging. During this time, my work focused on compensatory brain mechanisms that allow individuals to maintain normal cognitive performance despite the presence of disease pathology. I then completed a post-doctoral position at UC San Diego under William Kremen investigating the genetic and environmental influences on imaging and cognitive measures with the goal of improving early identification of Alzheimer's disease before receiving a faculty appointment at UCSD in 2019. Currently, I lead the Vietnam Era Twin Study of Aging (VETSA) MRI study and am an MPI on the parent VETSA study.

Research Interests:
My research program is guided by two over-arching and inter-related themes: 1) to improve early identification of Alzheimer’s disease by investigating contributors to and indicators of disease processes in early disease stages, and 2) to better characterize the heterogeneity of Alzheimer’s disease etiology and progression. I take a multi-disciplinary approach that integrates genetic, imaging, biomarker, and cognitive measures to investigate several specific lines of inquiry. First, I examine the etiological heterogeneity of Alzheimer’s disease by linking systematic variability in genetic risk to pathological and cognitive outcomes. A separate line of my work focuses on the role of the locus coeruleus (LC) in AD. This is one of the initial sites of tau deposition and I explore the potentially widespread impacts that loss of structural integrity in the LC may have on brain and cognitive health. I also conduct work demonstrating the value of sensitive cognitive and neuroimaging measures as widely available cost-effective tools in detecting the earliest stages of the disease. diffusion-based measures of cortical microstructure, which may provide more sensitivity to detect the earliest stages of neurodegeneration compared to typically used measure of cortical macrostructure.