Justina Avila-Rieger, PhD

Dr. Avila-Rieger received her PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of New Mexico, specializing in Neuropsychology and Quantitative Methodology. She completed a clinical internship in Neuropsychology at the Baltimore, Maryland VA Medical Center and her postdoctoral research training at CUIMC. During her graduate and postdoctoral training, she also specialized in health policy as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Research Fellow and a 2021-2022 Health and Aging Policy Fellow.

Dr. Avila-Rieger’s research aims to understand how gender-related social forces and sex-linked biological mechanisms contribute to Alzheimer’s disease (AD) risk, pathogenesis, and progression. Her approach to studying sex/gender inequalities in AD is guided by an intersectionality framework that focuses on how multiple experiences of structural level inequality (e.g., sexism, racism) overlap to influence late-life cognitive health outcomes. Her work integrates methodologies from various disciplines and employs state-of-the-art analytic techniques to address complex questions about the biological embedding of structural inequality across the lifecourse. Her long-term goal is to conduct research that directly influences the development of health policy solutions to reduce AD risk among women.