Elizabeth Sharp, B.A.
Clinical Research Coordinator II
Elizabeth graduated from Cornell University in 2020 with a BA in Psychology and concentration in behavioral and environmental neuroscience. Broadly, she is interested in using neuroimaging to research how psychopathology and stress impact memory and to discover novel biomarkers and treatments.
While at Cornell, she worked as an undergraduate research assistant in the Affect and Cognition Laboratory on an imaging study focusing on cognitive aging, cardiovascular factors, and the locus coeruleus. She was also previously a staff Research Assistant at Brown University, working on several longitudinal investigations into cognitive aging using multimodal imaging techniques. While at Brown, she engaged in a research project entitled “Associations between cerebrospinal fluid neurofilament light (NfL) protein and cortical atrophy across the Alzheimer’s disease spectrum”.
Elizabeth is currently working on our Aging study, a project studying subjects in a longitudinal cohort with the goal of assessing how factors such as sex, prenatal immune stress, and depression impact cognition and the development of Alzheimer’s disease in the aging brain.
More on our Aging Study : The global population is increasingly aging, thus maintaining healthy brain aging and prevention of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) are some of the most important public health/ economic challenges of our time. The CNL-SD studies aging using a lifespan perspective beginning in fetal development to explore developmental antecedents to brain aging, with a specific focus on key periods of sexual differentiation. Primary foci include 2 brain circuitries particularly vulnerable in early aging: memory and emotion circuitries. We take an innovative approach by integrating multi-modal imaging methods with early biomarkers and novel genetic strategies for understanding sex differences in brain aging and risk for AD.