May BAYDOUN

Biography

Dr. May A. Beydoun received her PhD in Epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with traineeship at the Carolina Population Center, under the mentorships of Dr. Jay S. Kaufman (Department of Epidemiology) and Dr. Barry M. Popkin (Department of Nutrition). She then completed a year and a half of postdoctoral fellowship in nutritional epidemiology at the Bloomberg School of Public Health under the mentorship of Dr. Youfa Wang (Center for Human Nutrition, Department of International Health). She joined the NIA IRP in 2008 as a staff scientist in the Laboratory of Personality and Cognition and is currently in the Health Disparities Research Section within the Laboratory of Epidemiology and Population Sciences. Over the years, she focused her attention on several areas of research. A key area of interest is neuro-cognitive aging (incident dementia including Alzheimer’s Disease, age-related cognitive decline or neuro-imaging endpoints) and its association with genetic, socio-economic, environmental, microbial, psychosocial, nutritional, inflammatory and other blood biomarkers, and cardio-metabolic risk factors using cross-sectional (National Health Nutrition Health Examination Surveys (NHANES), Nationwide Inpatient Sample (NIS), Nationwide Emergency Department Sample (NEDS), other AHRQ-HCUP and other national data), prospective (e.g. Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging (BLSA), Healthy Aging in Neighborhoods of Diversity Across the Life Span (HANDLS), Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC), Health and Retirement Study (HRS), Women’s Health Initiative (WHI)) and retrospective cohort (e.g. national data linked to CMS-Medicare, data) and ancillary neuro-imaging studies of diverse populations (e.g HANDLS-SCAN) to answer important related research questions. Another distinctive but related area is the associations of diet, other lifestyle factors, nutritional, inflammatory and other blood biomarkers with mental health outcomes, including depressive symptoms and sleep disorders. She also attempts to examine racial and socio-economic disparities, particularly in terms of dietary behaviors, metabolic disturbances, neuro-cognitive aging and mortality and how individual lifestyle factors, city and neighborhood level factors (e.g. monetary value of the diet) and psychosocial factors (including perceived racial and gender discrimination) may interact to influence those disparities.