Pursuing a Lifelong Interest in How Brains Age

Indira Turney, an associate research scientist at the Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer’s Disease and the Aging Brain in the Department of Neurology at Columbia University Medical Center, first became interested in the aging brain as a child, when she noticed her grandmother’s memory slipping. That interest led her to pursue psychology as an undergraduate, and cognitive neuroscience as a graduate student, and then eventually brought her to Columbia.

This fall, Turney was the lead author on “Brain Aging Among Racially and Ethnically Diverse Middle-Aged and Older Adults,” a paper in JAMA Neurology that examined markers of brain aging in racially and ethnically diverse midlife and older adults, and found that the brains of middle-aged Black adults showed more pronounced markers of aging than the brains of white and Latinx adults in the same age bracket. Columbia News sat down with Turney to discuss the significance of the findings, and what problems she hopes this kind of research can help address. [read more]

Source: Columbia News