Leadership

Principal Investigators

Dr. Maria Glymour, Professor and Chair in the Department of Epidemiology, leads research on social and behavioral risk and protective factors for dementia and quantitative methods to improve causal inferences for social factors. She co-founded Methods in Longitudinal Research on Dementia (MELODEM) in 2012, aiming to catalyze development and adoption of new quantitative methods to improve dementia research. Her work has advanced methods for addressing key challenges in AD/ADRD research, and she is MPI of the Kaiser Healthy Aging and Different Life Experiences (KHANDLE) cohort and the Triangulation of Innovative Methods to End Alzheimer’s Disease: TIME-AD project. Dr. Glymour is the contact principal investigator for BU-SHARP and leads the Administrative and Research Support Core.

Dr. Deborah Carr, A&S Distinguished Professor of Sociology, brings extensive expertise in aging, health, and life course research to her leadership role with BU-SHARP. Dr. Carr is a social demographer who both uses and plays a leadership role on several large longitudinal studies. Her work documents how social factors affect later life health, particularly for individuals living with disability and their caregivers. Dr. Carr has expertise in the roles of dyadic relationships (e.g., spouses) in shaping health; patterning; dying and bereavement; family relationships; and stigma associated with health conditions including disability. As director of the Center for Innovation in Social Science (CISS), Dr. Carr’s leadership fosters interdisciplinary research, collaboration, and mentorship across social sciences, enhancing BU-SHARP’s capacity to integrate sociological perspectives into research on dementia care and prevention. Dr. Carr is a principal investigator for BU-SHARP and leads the Program Development (Pilot) Core.

Dr. Andrew Stokes, Associate Professor of Global Health, specializes in demography and population health research, with a focus on the social, economic, health system, and health financing factors contributing to variation in health and mortality within the U.S. including dementia. His research combines traditional approaches from demography and epidemiology with novel methods for causal inference, spatiotemporal modeling, and machine learning. His expertise in demographic modeling to study variation in health and mortality and prior work on quantifying deaths attributable to AD/ADRD are closely related to BU-SHARP’s mission to quantify how social and contextual factors contribute to the dementia burden. His research, including work on the quality of health surveillance data in rural America, has been cited repeatedly in major media outlets, and his ongoing collaborations with journalists have inspired multiple projects. Dr. Stokes is a principal investigator for BU-SHARP and leads the Communication and Dissemination Core.

Co-Investigators

  • Dr. Tal Gross is a Professor in the Department of Markets, Public Policy & Law and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research focuses on health insurance and household finance, including how health system features and financing approaches affect care for individuals as they grow older and their impacts on families of older adults with health care needs,
  • Dr. Christopher Robertson is a Professor and N. Neal Pike Scholar in Health & Disability Law and a Professor of Health Law, Policy & Management. His research works at the intersection of intersection of law, health, and decision making. He brings wide-ranging experience on the policy implications of health systems research and supports BU-SHARP researchers in targeting their findings to the most salient audiences for potential policy and legal implications.
  • Dr. Jennifer Weuve is a Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and a co-leader of MELODEM. Her research examines how environmental exposures, such as air pollution, and social factors influence dementia risk. She is a leader in methodological innovation and advancing best practices for addressing reverse causation and measurement challenges in dementia research.

Executive Committee

BU-SHARP is led by an Executive Committee that meets on a biweekly basis. The committee includes the principal investigators, the co-investigators, and two early-career researchers selected on an annual basis.

Advisory Committee

BU-SHARP is supported by an Advisory Committee that meets twice per year to help the center remain at the forefront of AD/ADRD research, provide high-level guidance for programming and other initiatives, and maximize BU-SHARP’s influence at Boston University and beyond. The committee’s members will be announced later in 2026.

Staff

BU-SHARP’s administrative and programming efforts are supported by a Project Director and Project Manager.

Delilah Doeleman, MPH is the Project Director for BU-SHARP, and a Research Fellow in the Department of Epidemiology.

Project Manager: To be announced later in 2026.