Chandra L Muller
University of Texas at Austin, TX·Social Science
Why do some people keep sharp thinking skills into their seventies while others develop Alzheimer's disease and related dementias? Education is known to be one of the strongest predictors of brain health in later life, but researchers still know little about how, why, or for whom schooling matters.
- Fields
Social Science
Public Health & Epidemiology
Neuroscience
- Topics
Alzheimer's disease
dementia
cognitive aging
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Estimate how much high school experiences, such as advanced coursework, grades and degrees, shape cognitive, blood-based and behavioral markers of dementia risk at age 70 in the NLS-72 cohort.
- Test whether adult socioeconomic attainments, such as income and occupation, carry the effects of education on vascular health, pace of biological aging and cognitive functioning at age 70.
- Measure how much racial and ethnic differences in the quality of education, and in the benefits people gain from it, account for disparities in Alzheimer's-related risk markers.
- Collect in-home cognitive assessments, body measurements and whole blood, plus harmonized MRI brain scans for 400 participants, and release the NLS-72 data securely to researchers.
- Share the Center on Aging and Population Sciences' findings and data through research and data brief series, a data portal, workshops and cross-institution partnerships.
More about the research
Answering that requires following the same people from their teenage school years all the way into old age. Few such studies exist.
Why it matters
Alzheimer's disease and related dementias affect millions of older Americans, and racial and ethnic groups face unequal risk. By showing how and for whom education protects later-life cognition, this work could guide prevention strategies and clinical interventions. It could also help narrow disparities in cognitive health among future older adults. The publicly released data could let many other researchers test these questions rigorously.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Katrina Walsemann
University of Maryland, MD·Public Health & Epidemiology
Build the Education Contextual Data Resource (ECDR), a long-term record of state and local school conditions such as per-pupil spending and segregation, describing what Black and White older adults experienced across birth cohorts.
Sarah Patterson
University of Michigan, MI·Social Science·Early-career
Determine under what circumstances complex family and kinship ties, including step, legal, biological and voluntary kin, provide care, and how this differs for older adults living with ADRD.
Laura B Zahodne
University of Michigan, MI·Psychology
Follow MCAP participants for a third assessment and expand the cohort, then use latent growth curve modeling to test whether neighborhood socioeconomic status predicts differences in cognitive decline between Black and White older adults.
The school
University of Texas at Austin: 49 labs on PI Pages, $1.1B a year on research, 871 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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