Research
My research examines how social determinants across the life course contribute to disparities in age-related health outcomes by race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. I use advanced epidemiologic methods and large population-based datasets to investigate these questions. In addition, I study resilience factors and the biobehavioral mechanisms that underlie disparities in age-related health outcomes, with growing attention to policy solutions that address social determinants of brain health at the population level.
Cumulative effects of social determinants on age-related health outcomes
An important area of my research focuses on how social determinants, such as financial strain, neighborhood conditions, discrimination, and social relationships, cumulatively and interactively shape cognitive function and decline in late life. These exposures rarely act in isolation; instead, they accumulate over time and interact to contribute to late-life health outcome and health disparities.
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My earlier work applied a life course framework to examine how stress exposures across the life span contribute to disparities in cognitive function, with findings published in the Journals of Gerontology: Social Sciences and Social Science & Medicine.
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My recent work continued to explore how to better characterize the cumulative impact of stress exposures. For example, in a recent study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, my colleagues and I applied quantile g-computation to evaluate the independent and joint associations of the social exposome with cognitive function and decline.
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Social connections and late-life brain health
My research also examines how social networks protect against poor cognitive performance, cognitive decline, and dementia risk. Much of this work addresses methodological challenges in studying the impact of social relationships on dementia-related outcomes.
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For example, in a study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, we applied a Mendelian randomization approach to examine the associations between Alzheimer’s disease genetic risk and social relationships. Another line of work investigates how to address survival bias when studying the role of social relationships in cognitive aging, including projects that apply joint modeling approaches to examine social networks, cognitive function, and mortality simultaneously.
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I am also deeply interested in the conceptual and measurement challenges of defining social relationships, as well as in exploring how social relationships are linked to neuroimaging markers of brain health.
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Social policies, interventions, and age-related health outcomes
An exciting area of my research focuses on leveraging social policies to examine health outcomes in late life. This work is currently in development and includes building the datasets needed to evaluate the impact of social policies on dementia risk and disparities. It is supported by a K99 award from the National Institute on Aging.
Advancing Methods in Social Epidemiology
As a social epidemiologist, I am particularly interested in methods that improve our understanding of how social determinants, especially structural determinants, shape age-related health outcomes. My work addresses key methodological challenges, including quantifying the cumulative effects of social exposures across the life course, disentangling reverse causality between social conditions and health, improving the measurement of complex social exposures, and evaluating the health impacts of social policies.
