What inspired you to pursue aging research?
Memory and thinking are essential to our personhood—who we are to ourselves, to others, and our communities. Even subtle declines during aging can erode the person. And yet, this loss is not inevitable; everyone ages, but not everyone will experience this loss. This brings optimism to aging and the possibility to promote health, well-being, and resiliency across the lifespan. This is what inspires my research to translate basic mechanisms of changes in brain structure and function across the adult lifespan, intending to reduce disparities in cognitive aging.
In your view, what does AFAR mean to the field, and what does it mean, for you, to receive an AFAR grant now?
AFAR is a champion of innovation and multi-disciplinary thinking in research on aging. The questions on aging are vast and span every level of organization, from chemical reactions up to human social interaction. The breadth of expertise that AFAR has cultivated through stewarded research funding, especially for early career researchers, continues to shape gerontological research and has led to translational breakthroughs to meaningfully improve the lives of older adults.
What is exciting about your research’s potential impact?
The vast majority of older adults will experience typical cognitive decline, which is not so severe to warrant a dementia diagnosis but is nonetheless noticeable and disruptive to their quality of life. My research serves to translate basic mechanisms of aging that have been identified in animal models to now test them in relation to cognitive decline—one of the most salient features of aging and a substantial gap in creating policies to help older adults. By using MRI and blood biomarkers that are sensitive across the adult lifespan, I aim to understand the dynamic aging process and when decline initiates to better determine what we can do to mitigate it.
How would you describe your research to a non-scientist?
Thinking and memory processes change across the entire lifespan: the memory problems we see when someone is 70 or 80 years old are linked to subtle changes in brain structure and function starting when they were 20 or 30 years old. That gives us a lot of time to meaningfully promote brain health so to build resiliency against cognitive decline in late life, but we need to better understand the mechanisms of brain decline in order to do this. Iron is an important micronutrient that is essential for normal brain function, but in the course of aging it accumulates and this is thought to trigger several mechanisms of brain decline, including poor cell energy production, inflammation, and cell damage. Brain iron can be measured by MRI across the entire lifespan, and it is useful to identify risks for future cognitive decline. My research applies this method combined with other blood and genetic markers in long-term studies over 20 years to better understand how these different mechanisms act together to shape brain aging and when in the lifespan they start. The long-term goal of this work is to identify the risk for brain decline before it begins and help older adults maintain their cognition into late life.
