PROJECT SUMMARY / ABSTRACT
Older adults living in disadvantaged neighborhoods, marked by poor physical, social, and economic conditions,
are at elevated risk for dementia regardless of their personal sociodemographic characteristics. It is not yet
clear when in the lifespan such risk emerges or through which putative causal mechanisms, if it is indeed
causal. The activities proposed in this application will fill key research gaps in environmental health and
geroscience through first-ever longitudinal studies of neighborhood characteristics and brain aging in midlife,
when it is still possible to intervene to prevent dementia. They will inform the identification of at-risk individuals
and significantly advance the evidence base needed for potential neighborhood-level dementia interventions,
which could leverage public resources outside the healthcare sector and operate without requiring individual
behavior change. Proposed projects will integrate diverse geospatial neighborhood data (housed at Michigan
State University) into the four-decade archives of the Dunedin Study of psychosocial health, development, and
aging among a population-representative New Zealand-based cohort born in 1972 and followed to midlife. The
Dunedin cohort is the only one in the world with fine-grained measures of brain integrity from infancy to midlife,
with the latest assessment (age 45) including brain structural and functional antecedents of dementia. Studies
will determine: (1) whether individuals living in disadvantaged neighborhoods demonstrate signs of accelerated
brain aging by midlife; (2) if specific neighborhood characteristics are uniquely associated with midlife brain-
health deficits; and (3) whether pro-degenerative health behaviors and conditions (e.g., low physical activity,
hypertension, etc.) and are more common in disadvantaged settings and thus may act as causal meditators.
The applicant’s career goal is to become a clinical neuropsychologist and independent academic researcher
who conducts public health-oriented research on the degenerative consequences of environmental exposures
in the hopes of identifying modifiable risk factors and unique interventions to lower the global burden of brain
disease. This fellowship will leverage a multi-university training plan to significantly advance the applicant’s
career by allowing him to: (1) enter a PI-role in the Dunedin Study; (2) gain additional training to advance his
unique research goals, including in established and cutting-edge methods in geospatial analysis, neurotoxicant
assessment, and premorbid modeling of brain aging and dementia; and (3) prepare for an innovative career
bridging environmental health and psychology with job-readiness skills in teaching, mentoring, and grant
writing and management. Mentored training will occur in psychiatric, geospatial, and environmental
epidemiology labs at Duke, Michigan State, and Harvard, supplemented by coursework, workshops, and
conferences. The fellowship will ensure the applicant's move to independence for a unique body of work
investigating environmental contributions to pathological brain aging, with future steps involving additional data
linkage and assessment in older and younger cohorts and at the next assessment phase of the Dunedin Study.