Meet the Leadership Team
For the best viewing experience, make sure that you access MELODEM via this website (it should have “sites” in the URL): https://sites.bu.edu/melodem/
Maria Glymour
Dr. Maria Glymour is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Epidemiology at Boston University School of Public Health (https://www.bu.edu/sph/profile/maria-glymour/). Her research focuses on how social factors experienced across the lifecourse, from infancy to adulthood, influence cognitive aging, Alzheimer’s disease and other causes of dementia, stroke, and other health outcomes in old age. Dr. Glymour is especially interested in education and other exposures amenable to policy interventions. A separate theme of her research focuses on overcoming methodological problems encountered in analyses of social determinants of health, Alzheimer’s disease, and dementia. For many reasons, research focusing on lifecourse epidemiology as well as cognitive aging introduces substantial methodological challenges. Sometimes, these are conceptual challenges, and clear causal thinking can help.
Carole Dufouil
(photo & bio coming soon)
Jennifer Weuve
Dr. Jennifer Weuve is a Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Boston University School of Public Health. In her research, she seeks to identify causes of dementia, particularly the role of exposures to environmental toxicants. She is the PI or co-investigator of several NIH-funded epidemiologic investigations air pollution exposure and dementia etiology. She is also the PI of the R13 grant supporting MELODEM and has the privilege of providing methodologic guidance on a wide range of studies of neurodegenerative outcomes. Dr. Weuve earned her MPH degree in epidemiology from the University of Minnesota and her doctoral degree from the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.
Cécile Proust-Lima
Dr. Cécile Proust-Lima is a Director of Research in Biostatistics at the Bordeaux Population Health Research Center (Inserm, Univ. Bordeaux, France). Her research mainly focuses on the development of dynamic statistical models to describe, explain and predict chronic disease progression. She has specialized over the years in the joint analysis of correlated longitudinal markers and event time history with applications notably in neurodegenerative diseases. Her works, made available through
open-source software, address epidemiological and clinical questions thanks to strong collaborations with epidemiologists and clinicians and access to large cohort studies.
Suzanne Judd
Dr. Suzanne Judd is the Director of the Lister Hill Center for Health Policy and a Professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She received her PhD in Nutrition Sciences and MPH in Epidemiology from Emory University where she led two vitamin D clinical trials. Dr. Judd is multiple PI on both the REGARDS and RURAL cohort studies which are large NIH funded epidemiological cohort studies seeking to understand disparities in chronic disease in the United States. Her experience in the US provided a platform to collaborate with European cohort studies in France through the Fulbright Scholar Program. Dr. Judd’s research focuses on the role of diet and the environment as mediators of racial disparities in brain health.
Elizabeth Rose Mayeda
Dr. Elizabeth Rose Mayeda is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the UCLA FieldingSchool of Public Health. The substantive focus of Dr. Mayeda’s research is on identifying the origins and lifecourse mechanisms of racial, ethnic, and other social disparities in Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias. To address these research questions rigorously, Dr. Mayeda’s work emphasizes methods to strengthen causal inference, especially tools to quantify and remediate selection bias arising from selective sampling, attrition, or survival.