"Not Your Grandmother's Alzheimer's Disease: A New Era for an Old Disease"

Made Possible by the Lorraine Sulkin Schein Endowment Fund

Speaker:

Heather Whitson, M.D., M.H.S.
Professor of Medicine
Director, Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development
Co-Director, Duke & UNC Alzheimer's Disease Research Center
Duke University School of Medicine

About Heather Whitson:

Dr. Whitson holds a bachelor's degree in biological sciences from Stanford University. She obtained her medical degree from Cornell University Weill Medical College in New York and completed internal medicine residency training at Duke University, where she received advanced training through a fellowship in geriatrics and also earned a master's degree in health sciences.

Dr. Whitson's research focuses on improving care options and resilience for people with multiple chronic conditions. In particular, she has interest and expertise related to the link between age-related changes in the eye and brain. She leads a collaborative Alzheimer's Disease initiative that brings together investigators from Duke University and the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, with a goal to transform dementia research and care throughout the region. She is also interested in improving health services to better meet the needs of medically complex patients. Within the Duke Aging Center, she leads research efforts aimed at promoting resilience to late-life stressors, such as surgery, sensory loss, and infection. She has developed a novel rehabilitation model for people with co-existing vision and cognitive deficits, and she is part of an interdisciplinary team seeking to improve peri-operative outcomes for frail or at-risk seniors who must undergo surgery. As a co-leader of a national resilience collaborative, she seeks to better understand the biological and psychological factors that determine how well we "bounce back" after health stressors.