HEADS Expert Spotlight: Alden Gross, PhD
Alden Gross, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He joined the HEADS Pilot Core leadership last July and serves as a member of the Center’s Executive Committee.
Tell us a little bit about your research. How does it contribute to the overall goal of the HEADS Center?
My work is focused on developing novel methods for measurement of cognitive health and functioning in older adults. This entails both classification algorithms for dementia, as well as continuous measures of general and domain-specific cognitive functioning. This work is related to HEADS in the sense that if we aren’t measuring something properly, then, we cannot manage it. My most impactful work integrates advanced psychometric methods with substantively and clinically important questions.
Share a current project you are working on and any early findings.
Currently, I am working with colleagues to develop a measure of early cognitive impairment – during the preclinical Alzheimer's disease phase – in the Biomarkers for Older Controls at Risk for Dementia study. The goal of this study "Contribution of sensorimotor function to risk and pathogenic mechanisms of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias", funded by an NIA R01 and led by Drs. Schrack and Agrawal, is to identify markers of impairment earlier in the life course and to study sensorimotor correlates of early deterioration. I am a Multiple Principal Investigator with Dr. Lindsay Kobayashi for another study "Socioeconomic and Cardiovascular Sources of Cross-National Variation in Cognitive Health Among Older Adults" funded by an NIA R01, which is leveraging cognitive tests from the Health and Retirement Study and National Health and Aging Trends Study to mutually inform dementia algorithms in both studies. That work could improve our dementia phenotypes in several large, nationally representative studies. In a third project supported by the Gateway to Global Aging and an R01 that I lead, we are statistically co-calibrating continuous measures of general and domain-specific cognitive functioning across the U.S. and several other studies that have administered harmonized cognitive assessment protocols. This work will facilitate entire new areas of research across nations in cognitive aging.