UCSD Profiles

search, discover, network

Dr. LaCroix received her PhD in Epidemiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in cardiovascular disease at The Johns Hopkins University. Dr. LaCroix came from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Public Health Sciences Division where she led many activities for the Women's Health Initiative Clinical Coordinating Center for more than 17 years. She was also a faculty member at the University of Washington (UW) from 1989 to 2013 and a Senior Scientific Investigator at the Group Health Research Institute. Dr. LaCroix's research focuses on the identification of behavioral, pharmaceutical, biomarker, and genetic factors related to the development of chronic diseases including cancer, cardiovascular disease, and fracture outcomes. Dr. LaCroix specializes in the health of postmenopausal and older women and has built and sustained a research program that spans the broad areas of etiologic epidemiologic studies, improving health services and testing preventive interventions that have improved public health and clinical care for women across the lifespan. As a clinical trialist, Dr. LaCroix has been the Seattle Principal Investigator for several major trials testing preventive interventions for fracture including the Fracture Intervention Trial and the PEARL Trial. In addition to WHI, she leads the Data Coordinating Center for the Menopause Strategies: Finding Lasting Answers for Symptoms and Heath (MsFLASH), a U01 multidisciplinary network of clinical trialists which has conducted 4 clinical trials testing 7 interventions for relief of menopause symptoms over the past 6 years. She has served on the National Advisory Council on Aging, the Clinical Trials Advisory Panel and chaired the BCA-B Study Section for NIA. In 2010, she was the recipient of the McDougall Mentoring Award for her development of postdoctoral fellows within her T32 training program entitled, "Improving Health Care for Aging Women." Dr. LaCroix is Director of UCSD's Women's Health Center of Excellence that launched in December 2013 and the author of 300 publications.