M. Maria Glymour, SD
Professor (appointment pending)
Boston University School of Public Health
Epidemiology

SD, Harvard School of Public Health



Research Interests
- Cognitive aging, Alzheimer's disease, and related causes of dementia
- Social and geographic determinants of health in aging
- Social policies and health
- Causal inference in ADRD research and social epidemiology

My research focuses on how social factors experienced across the lifecourse, from infancy to adulthood, influence cognitive function, dementia, stroke, and other health outcomes in old age. I am especially interested in education and other exposures amenable to policy interventions. The health of current cohorts of elderly individuals in the US reflect a lifetime of social exposures, including educational experiences shaped by major changes in schooling policies. One thread of my research examines how changes in schooling laws and school quality in the 20th century might have influenced the health and cognitive functioning of current cohorts of elderly. Our results suggest that extra schooling has substantial benefits for memory function in the elderly independent of any “innate” characteristics. I have also worked on the influence of "place" on health, for example to understand the excess stroke burden for individuals who grew up in the US Stroke Belt. With my colleague Dr. Adina Zeki Al-Hazzouri, I also have a grant evaluating the long term effects of migrating from Mexico to the US on cognitive outcomes and dementia risk. In a project with colleagues including Drs. Rachel Whitmer, Elizabeth Rose Mayeda, and Paola Gilsanz, we are continuing a unique multi-ethnic cohort of older adults in Northern California, with a wealth of lifecourse biological and social data to offer insight into the reasons for racial/ethnic differences in Alzheimer's and dementia risk (https://rachelwhitmer.ucdavis.edu/khandle).

A separate theme of my 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 lifecourse epidemiology as well as cognitive aging introduces substantial methodological challenges. Sometimes, these are conceptual challenges, and clear causal thinking can help! Many of these challenges are being addressed in the MELODEM (MEthods in LOngitudinal research on DEMentia) initiative, an international group of researchers focusing on analytic challenges in research on dementia and cognitive aging. MELODEM has working group phone calls on the first and third Thursdays of the month, open to all. Sign up at melodem.org. Related to this, I work with my colleague Dr. Melinda Power (George Washington University) on a project to align evidence from observational and randomized studies of the impact of diabetes on Alzheimer's disease. In collaboration with Dr. Zeki Al Hazzouri, we are linking data sets with detailed information at different lifecourse periods to better evaluate long-term effects of exposures at specific sensitive ages. Many of the methodological problems might be circumvented by clever research designs. To that end, we are evaluating the puzzling pattern of an inverse association between cancer and Alzheimer's Disease to illuminate biological or artefactual explanations.

I have advocated the use of causal directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) as a standard research tool to represent our causal hypotheses and help elucidate potential biases in proposed analyses. In other cases, the methodological problems require more analytical solutions that have been developed elsewhere in epidemiology or in other disciplines, but are rarely applied to these research questions. Instrumental variables analyses of natural or induced experiments are one promising example. Genetic variations have recently been advanced as possible instrumental variables to estimate the health effects of a wide range of phenotypes, an approach sometimes called “Mendelian Randomization.” Using genetic polymorphisms as instrumental variables could provide a very powerful tool for social epidemiology, but the inferences from such analyses rest on strong assumptions. Thus I am currently working with a team to explore approaches to evaluating the plausibility of those assumptions in applications for social epidemiology.

I currently serve as the Director for the UCSF PhD program in Epidemiology and Translational Science (http://epibiostat.ucsf.edu/doctoral-program-epidemiology-translational-science). With Drs. Bob Hiatt and Peggy Cawthon, I co-lead the UCSF T32 training grant on Aging and Chronic Disease (https://epibiostat.ucsf.edu/training-research-aging-and-chronic-disease), which offers financial support for pre- and post-doctoral researchers. With Drs. Aric Prather and Will Brown, I co-lead the UCSF T32 on Data Science Training to Advance Behavioral and Social Science Expertise for Health Disparities Research (DaTABASE) https://epibiostat.ucsf.edu/data-science-training-advance-behavioral-and-social-science-expertise-health-disparities-research, which supports pre-doctoral trainees as part of the national TADA-BSSR consortium.
Trainees interested in research collaborations related to my work are welcome to send me an email directly or contact Bev Bitagon, who coordinates our group.
Research Interests
? Cognitive aging, Alzheimer's disease, and related causes of dementia
? Social and geographic determinants of health in aging
? Social policies and health
? Causal inference in ADRD research and social epidemiology

My research focuses on how social factors experienced across the lifecourse, from infancy to adulthood, influence cognitive function, dementia, stroke, and other health outcomes in old age. I am especially interested in education and other exposures amenable to policy interventions. The health of current cohorts of elderly individuals in the US reflect a lifetime of social exposures, including educational experiences shaped by major changes in schooling policies. One thread of my research examines how changes in schooling laws and school quality in the 20th century might have influenced the health and cognitive functioning of current cohorts of elderly. Our results suggest that extra schooling has substantial benefits for memory function in the elderly independent of any “innate” characteristics. I have also worked on the influence of "place" on health, for example to understand the excess stroke burden for individuals who grew up in the US Stroke Belt. With my colleague Dr. Adina Zeki Al-Hazzouri, I also have a grant evaluating the long term effects of migrating from Mexico to the US on cognitive outcomes and dementia risk. In a project with colleagues including Drs. Rachel Whitmer, Elizabeth Rose Mayeda, and Paola Gilsanz, we are continuing a unique multi-ethnic cohort of older adults in Northern California, with a wealth of lifecourse biological and social data to offer insight into the reasons for racial/ethnic differences in Alzheimer's and dementia risk (https://rachelwhitmer.ucdavis.edu/khandle).

A separate theme of my 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 lifecourse epidemiology as well as cognitive aging introduces substantial methodological challenges. Sometimes, these are conceptual challenges, and clear causal thinking can help! Many of these challenges are being addressed in the MELODEM (MEthods in LOngitudinal research on DEMentia) initiative, an international group of researchers focusing on analytic challenges in research on dementia and cognitive aging. MELODEM has working group phone calls on the first and third Thursdays of the month, open to all. Sign up at melodem.org. Related to this, I work with my colleague Dr. Melinda Power (George Washington University) on a project to align evidence from observational and randomized studies of the impact of diabetes on Alzheimer's disease. In collaboration with Dr. Zeki Al Hazzouri, we are linking data sets with detailed information at different lifecourse periods to better evaluate long-term effects of exposures at specific sensitive ages. Many of the methodological problems might be circumvented by clever research designs. To that end, we are evaluating the puzzling pattern of an inverse association between cancer and Alzheimer's Disease to illuminate biological or artefactual explanations.

I have advocated the use of causal directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) as a standard research tool to represent our causal hypotheses and help elucidate potential biases in proposed analyses. In other cases, the methodological problems require more analytical solutions that have been developed elsewhere in epidemiology or in other disciplines, but are rarely applied to these research questions. Instrumental variables analyses of natural or induced experiments are one promising example. Genetic variations have recently been advanced as possible instrumental variables to estimate the health effects of a wide range of phenotypes, an approach sometimes called “Mendelian Randomization.” Using genetic polymorphisms as instrumental variables could provide a very powerful tool for social epidemiology, but the inferences from such analyses rest on strong assumptions. Thus I am currently working with a team to explore approaches to evaluating the plausibility of those assumptions in applications for social epidemiology.

I currently serve as the Director for the UCSF PhD program in Epidemiology and Translational Science (http://epibiostat.ucsf.edu/doctoral-program-epidemiology-translational-science). With Drs. Bob Hiatt and Peggy Cawthon, I co-lead the UCSF T32 training grant on Aging and Chronic Disease (https://epibiostat.ucsf.edu/training-research-aging-and-chronic-disease), which offers financial support for pre- and post-doctoral researchers. With Drs. Aric Prather and Will Brown, I co-lead the UCSF T32 on Data Science Training to Advance Behavioral and Social Science Expertise for Health Disparities Research (DaTABASE) https://epibiostat.ucsf.edu/data-science-training-advance-behavioral-and-social-science-expertise-health-disparities-research, which supports pre-doctoral trainees as part of the national TADA-BSSR consortium.
Trainees interested in research collaborations related to my work are welcome to send me an email directly or contact Bev Bitagon, who coordinates our group.

Chair (appointment pending)
Boston University School of Public Health
Epidemiology


Publications listed below are automatically derived from MEDLINE/PubMed and other sources, which might result in incorrect or missing publications. Faculty can login to make corrections and additions.

iCite Analysis       Copy PMIDs To Clipboard

  1. Kezios KL, Zimmerman SC, Zhang A, Calonico S, Jawadekar N, Glymour MM, Zeki Al Hazzouri A. Propensity Scores in Health Disparities Research: The Example of Cognitive Aging and the Hispanic Paradox. Epidemiology. 2023 Jul 01; 34(4):495-504. PMID: 36976729
     
  2. Ospina-Romero M, Brenowitz WD, Glymour MM, Westrick A, Graff RE, Hayes-Larson E, Mayeda ER, Ackley SF, Kobayashi LC. Education, incident cancer, and rate of memory decline in a national sample of US adults in mid-to-later-life. J Geriatr Oncol. 2023 May 19; 14(5):101530. PMID: 37210786
     
  3. Chen R, Calmasini C, Swinnerton K, Wang J, Haneuse S, Ackley SF, Hirst AK, Hayes-Larson E, George KM, Peterson R, Soh Y, Barnes LL, Mayeda ER, Gilsanz P, Mungas DM, Whitmer RA, Corrada MM, Glymour MM. Pragmatic approaches to handling practice effects in longitudinal cognitive aging research. Alzheimers Dement. 2023 May 18. PMID: 37199336
     
  4. Ackley SF, Wang J, Chen R, Power MC, Allen IE, Glymour MM. Estimated Effects of Amyloid Reduction on Cognitive Change: A Bayesian Update across a Range of Priors. medRxiv. 2023 May 03. PMID: 37205483; PMCID: PMC10187341; DOI: 10.1101/2023.04.28.23289223;
     
  5. Seblova D, Eng C, Avila-Rieger JF, Dworkin JD, Peters K, Lapham S, Zahodne LB, Chapman B, Prescott CA, Gruenewald TL, Arpawong TE, Gatz M, Jones RJ, Glymour MM, Manly JJ. High school quality is associated with cognition 58 years later. Alzheimers Dement (Amst). 2023; 15(2):e12424. PMID: 37144175; PMCID: PMC10152568; DOI: 10.1002/dad2.12424;
     
  6. Lundberg DJ, Wrigley-Field E, Cho A, Raquib R, Nsoesie EO, Paglino E, Chen R, Kiang MV, Riley AR, Chen YH, Charpignon ML, Hempstead K, Preston SH, Elo IT, Glymour MM, Stokes AC. COVID-19 Mortality by Race and Ethnicity in US Metropolitan and Nonmetropolitan Areas, March 2020 to February 2022. JAMA Netw Open. 2023 May 01; 6(5):e2311098.View Related Profiles. PMID: 37129894; PMCID: PMC10155069; DOI: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2023.11098;
     
  7. Gutierrez S, Meza E, Glymour MM, Torres JM. My parent, myself, or my child: whose education matters most for trajectories of cognitive aging in middle age? Am J Epidemiol. 2023 Apr 28. PMID: 37116072
     
  8. Nguyen TT, Merchant JS, Criss S, Makres K, Gowda KN, Mane H, Yue X, Hswen Y, Glymour MM, Nguyen QC, Allen AM. Examining Twitter-Derived Negative Racial Sentiment as Indicators of Cultural Racism: Observational Associations With Preterm Birth and Low Birth Weight Among a Multiracial Sample of Mothers, 2011-2021. J Med Internet Res. 2023 Apr 28; 25:e44990. PMID: 37115602; PMCID: PMC10182466; DOI: 10.2196/44990;
     
  9. Gebreegziabher E, Bountogo M, Sié A, Zakane A, Compaoré G, Ouedraogo T, Lebas E, Nyatigo F, Glymour M, Arnold BF, Lietman TM, Oldenburg CE. Influence of maternal age on birth and infant outcomes at 6 months: a cohort study with quantitative bias analysis. Int J Epidemiol. 2023 Apr 19; 52(2):414-425. PMID: 36617176; PMCID: PMC10114123; DOI: 10.1093/ije/dyac236;
     
  10. Soh Y, Eng CW, Mayeda ER, Whitmer RA, Lee C, Peterson RL, Mungas DM, Glymour MM, Gilsanz P. Association of primary lifetime occupational cognitive complexity and cognitive decline in a diverse cohort: Results from the KHANDLE study. Alzheimers Dement. 2023 Apr 14. PMID: 37057753
     
Showing 10 of 431 results. Show More

This graph shows the total number of publications by year, by first, middle/unknown, or last author.

Bar chart showing 431 publications over 22 distinct years, with a maximum of 50 publications in 2022

YearPublications
19911
19921
20042
20052
20062
20077
200812
20096
20104
201117
201226
201317
201432
201524
201633
201729
201830
201934
202035
202147
202250
202320

2018 American Journal of Epidemiology: American Journal of Epidemiology Reviewers of the Year Award
2017 University of California, San Francisco, Academic Senate: Mentoring Award - Associate Professor Level
2016 American Journal of Epidemiology: American Journal of Epidemiology Reviewers of the Year Award
2013 Columbia University, Mailman School of Public Health: Columbia University Psychiatric- Neurological Epidemiology Early Investigator Award
2012 Harvard School of Public Health: Mentoring Award
Contact for Mentoring:
Glymour's Networks
Click the "See All" links for more information and interactive visualizations
Concepts
_
Media Mentions
_
Co-Authors
_
Similar People
_
Same Department