MELODEM Slides
2024 Slides
November 21st: Yingyan is a final year epidemiology PhD student at UCLA. Her dissertation is focused on estimating effects of life course social factors and health behaviors on late-life cognitive health among older adults. She will present her work on using equipercentile equating to harmonize cognitive scores across waves in the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS). She will also present preliminary findings on the estimated effects of continuing education in adulthood on late-life cognitive decline in CHARLS.
October 17th, 2024: Mary is a third-year PhD student at UCSF. Her research focuses on social and psychosocial risk factors of cognitive aging, utilizing large longitudinal cohort studies of older adults. She primarily focuses substantively on social isolation and loneliness as risk factors of cognitive aging.
October 3rd, 2024: Vijaya Kolachalama is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Medicine & Computer Science at Boston University. He is also one of the founding members of the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences at BU. Before joining BU, he was a Principal Member of Technical Staff at Draper Laboratory and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Edelman Laboratory at MIT, where he also served as an ORISE Fellow at the US Food & Drug Administration. His laboratory focuses on biomedical machine vision, multimodal representation learning, and domain generalization, with various medical applications. His team is particularly interested in developing software frameworks based on generalist AI principles to assist clinical practitioners in real-world settings.
September 19th, 2024: Dr. Roopal Desai is a Clinical Fellow at University College London. Roopal is a clinical academic and initially trained as a Clinical Psychologist. She continues to work 1-day/week clinically conducting neuropsychology assessments on people with various dementias. The rest of her time she conducts research in the field of aging with a particular focus on modifiable risk factors for dementia.
Dr. Verena Zuber is a senior lecturer in biostatistics in the school of Public Health – Faculty of Medicine at Imperial College London. Her research focus is the development of novel methodology for causal interference and its application in life science and health data research. A particular focus of her research is the use of genetic variation as instrumental variables, a study design also known as Mendelian randomization.
May 16th, 2024: Gabriel L. Schwartz, PhD, is a social epidemiologist and Assistant Professor at Drexel University. His work examines how social stratification, social policy, and the places we live shape health inequities across the life course. In particular, Dr. Schwartz studies housing insecurity and racial segregation as public health problems. Dr. Gabe Schwartz presents on ongonig work on housing insecurity and older adults’ cognition, using data from the Health & Retirement Study.
April 18, 2024: Dr. Byron Jaeger is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostatistics and Data Science at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. He is an R enthusiast, and his research focuses on survival analysis and machine learning. In his talk, he’ll present the basics of decision trees and random forests. From there, he’ll discuss oblique random forests for risk prediction and causal random forests for interpretation of heterogeneous effects and present a brief demo using real data.
March 21, 2024: Erin Ferguson is a PhD candidate in Epidemiology and Translational Science at the University of California, San Francisco. Her doctoral work applies causal inference methods in electronic health records to answer methodologically complex questions about Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias. Her present work investigates a source of bias epidemiologists rarely consider: our own decision-making. This talk will: 1) address the problem our own decisions pose in the context of reproducibility and bias, 2) introduce specification analysis and vibrations of effect, and 3) walk through an example related to statin use and dementia risk. She presented her talk, “Robustness of effect estimates to varying model specifications: An application to statin use and risk of dementia using data from a large healthcare plan”.
March 7, 2024: Dr. Joan Monin is an Associate Professor at the Yale School of Public Health. Her research fuses survey methods with experimental approaches to understand the emotional mechanisms that influence health in older adult relationships. Professor Monin’s work is particularly focused on the dynamics between caregivers and care recipients in the context of early-stage dementia. She presented her talk, “Systolic Blood Pressure During Conversations between Older Adults Living with Cognitive Impairment and their Children: Associations with Attachment Security”.
February 29, 2024: Dr. Eleanor Hayes-Larson is a postdoctoral fellow in epidemiology at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. Her research includes work to understand psychosocial determinants of dementia in diverse populations, as well as methodological work focused on understanding and improving tools for causal inference in dementia research, using both statistical simulation studies and empirical data analysis. She presented her talk, “Implications of timescale choice for estimated effects of exposures on rate of cognitive change among older adults: Results from the 2022 MELODEM Data Workshop”.
February 1, 2024: A special debate and discussion featuring Dr. David Wallon of the Rouen University Hospital in France, and Dr. Vincent Planche of Bordeaux University Hospital in France. The topic of the discussion was, “Are anti-amyloid immunotherapies “disease modifying” or symptomatic treatments of Alzheimer’s Disease?”
Dr. David Wallon is a neurologist and Director of the Memory Resource and Research Center at the Rouen University Hospital. He is also co-director of the National Reference Center for Young Alzheimer’s Patients (CNR-MAJ), a center of excellence for specific issues related to early onset Alzheimer’s disease (EOAD), including genetics. After obtaining his doctorate in medicine from the University of Rouen-Normandy in 2011, he began his research on the genetics of EOAD characterizing the clinical manifestations associated with rare autosomal dominant forms. He obtained a PhD in Neurosciences from the University of Rouen Normandy in 2014 and then studied the brain imaging of EOAD patients at UCL in London in 2015. He is now also focusing on cerebral amyloid angiopathy, a disease with mechanisms in common with Alzheimer’s disease, to improve diagnosis and understanding, by determining the genetic factors potentially involved in this vascular pathology.
Dr. Vincent Planche is a researcher and neurologist at the Institute of Neurodegenerative Diseases, and head of the Memory Clinic at Bordeaux University Hospital. He is also currently Associate Professor of neurology at Bordeaux University and researcher in the Institute of Neurodegenerative Diseases. His research focuses on the pathophysiology of neurodegenerative diseases, using both pre-clinical approaches on animal models and clinical studies on patients with neurodegenerative diseases, using fluid biomarkers and structural MRI. While he was initially working on Multiple Sclerosis, he is now interested in tauopathies in general and Alzheimer’s disease in particular.
January 18, 2024: Dr, Maria Glymour is Professor and Chair of the Department of Epidemiology at Boston University School of Public Health, and co-founder of the MELODEM Initiative. Her research focuses on how social factors experienced across the life course—from infancy to adulthood—influence cognitive function, dementia, stroke, and other health outcomes in old age. She is particularly 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 life course epidemiology as well as cognitive aging introduces substantial methodological challenges. She presented her talk on “Evidence Triangulation”. She was joined by Sirena Gutierrez, a current PhD candidate in Epidemiology and Translational Science at the University of California San Francisco.
2023 Slides
November 30th, 2023: Dr. Zachary Kunicki is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University where he also serves as the assistant director of the Quantitative Science Program. His talk, “Understanding Normative Cognitive Aging” focuses on the challenges of identifying a trajectory of normative cognitive aging, or cognitive aging in the absence of a neurocognitive disorder using the Children of the Depression cohort of the Health and Retirement Study.
October 19th, 2023: Dr. Khadka will discuss quantile regressions as a tool to assess how the educational attainment-cognitive decline relationship varies along the cognition distribution and will also present an empirical example demonstrating these ideas in which he evaluates the effect of Vietnam-era G.I. Bill eligibility, a large-scale educational intervention in the US, on later-life, age-related memory decline.
October 5th, 2023: Dr. Paloma Rojas-Saunero, a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Epidemiology, Fielding School of Public health, UCLA will be presenting on “Effect of incident stroke on the risk of dementia over a period of 10 years of follow-up in a cohort of Asian American and white older adults in California.” Dr. Paloma Rojas-Saunera’s work focuses on how to extend the target trial framework and causal inference methods to study social determinants and cardiometabolic disorders in dementia and other aging related outcomes.
September 21st, 2023: Dr. Suzanne Judd, professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Dr. Judd will be introducing us to two amazing cohort studies on which she is a PI: REGARDS and RURAL. Her research focuses on racial and regional differences in brain health with a particular focus on nutritional drivers of differences.
Suzanne Judd, Cognitive Impairments in REGARDS
May 4th, 2023: Elizabeth Rose Mayeda, University of California, Los Angeles, Fielding School of Public Health will be presenting on “How much does amyloid burden predict memory decline at the population level? A transportability analysis.”
April 20th, 2023: Jennifer J. Manly, Department of Neurology and the Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer’s Disease and the Aging Brain, Columbia University, “Methods for Estimating National Prevalence of Dementia and MCI from the Harmonized Cognitive Assessment Protocol Project.”
April 6th, 2023: Maude Wagner, BPH Research Center, Bordeaux University, “Using Longitudinal Continuous Measures to Capture Key Complementary Dimensions of Cognitive Resilience to AD Neuropathology”
March 16th, 2023: Roch A. Nianogo, Fielding School of Public Health, UCLA, “Risk Factors Associated with Alzheimer Disease and Related Dementias by Sex and Race and Ethnicity in the US”
March 2nd, 2023: Lon S. Schneider, Keck School of Medicine of USC, “Lecanemab: effectiveness, approval, and why it takes a village”
February 16th, 2023: Terry M Therneau, Department of Quantitative Health Sciences, Mayo Clinic, “Competing risks and the Fine-Gray model”
February 2nd, 2023: Erin E. Bennett, The George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health, “Methodological considerations in target trial emulation using cohort studies: estimating the effect of antihypertensive medication initiation on incident dementia in ARIC, CHS, and HRS”
January 19th, 2023: Marina Sirota, Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute, UCSF, “Leveraging Molecular and Clinical Data to Better Understand Alzheimer’s Disease”
2022 Slides
December 15th, 2022: Sepideh Modrek, San Francisco State University, Health Equity Institute & David Rehkopf, Stanford University, “Long-term effects of Local Area New Deal Work-Relief in Childhood on Educational and Cognitive Outcomes over the Life Course”
Sepideh Modrek & David Rehkopf
December 1, 2022: Tara E. Jenson, Zilber School of Public Health, University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, “Environmental Cadmium Exposures, Cognitive Performance in Older Adults, and Subsequent Alzheimer’s Disease Mortality.”
November 3, 2022: Tianhao Wang, Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center, Rush University Medical Center, “The ‘cognitive clock’: A novel indicator of brain health”
October 20, 2022: Emma Nichols, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, “The use of algorithms for the identification of incident dementia: challenges and potential biases:
October 6, 2022: John (Rob) Warren, Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota “High School & Beyond: Turning an Education Cohort Study into an ADRD Study.”
September 15, 2022: Marcia P Jimenez, Boston University & L. Paloma Rojas-Saunero, UCLA “Racial and ethnic differences in the risk of dementia under hypothetical blood-pressure-lowering interventions: The Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis.”
2021 Slides
November 18, 2021: Madhav Thambisetty, NIA/NIH, “From Mechanisms to Medicines: realizing the DREAM of an Alzheimer’s cure.”
October 28, 2021: Venexia Walker, University of Bristol, “Predicting drug repurposing opportunities for Alzheimer’s disease prevention using genome-wide association study data”
October 8, 2021: Maria Glymous, UCSF, “Introduction to using Directed Acyclic Graphs in dementia research”
September 15, 2021: Ryan Andrews, Boston University School of Public Health, “Meditations on Mediation Analysis”
September 2, 2021: Michelle Odden, Stanford University, “Collider Stratification Bias in Studies of Dementia: Mountain or Molehill?”
July 15, 2021: Thomas Nedelec, Paris Brain Institute, “Data-driven identification of health conditions associated with incident Alzheimer’s disease dementia risk: a 15 years follow-up cohort from electronic health records in France and the United Kingdom”
June 3, 2021: L. Paloma Rojas-Saunero, Erasmus MC, “Dissecting the causal question underlying the association between cancer and dementia”
April 1, 2021: Zach Baucom, Boston University School of Public Health, “Using State Space Models for Longitudinal Neuropsychological Outcomes”
March 18, 2021: Lon Schneider, University of Southern California, “Methodological features and FDA’s regulatory guidance on aducanumab and Alzheimer drug development”
2020 Slides
October 15, 2020: Deborah Blacker & Sudeshna Seshadri, Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts General Hospital, “Towards Real-World Data for Dementia Studies: Use of machine-learning to improve metrics”
Sudeshna Seshadri & Deborah Blacker
July 9, 2020: Bryan James, Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center, “Implications of covid for dementia researchers”
May 7, 2020: Jonathan Jackson, Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts General Hospital, “The Challenge of Health Equity in Clinical Research: Towards a Quantifiable Science of Inclusion.”