Ethan Whitman

Ethan is a Clinical Psychology PhD student working with Ahmad Hariri, Terrie Moffitt, and Avshalom Caspi. Before coming to Duke, he graduated from Tufts University and worked as a research fellow at the National Institute of Mental Health. He is interested in understanding brain and cognitive aging through neuroimaging-based predictive modeling. In particular, he is interested in the measurement of aging during middle adulthood.

Current Appointments & Affiliations

Student Psychology & Neuroscience, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences

Recent Publications

DunedinPACNI estimates the longitudinal Pace of Aging from a single brain image to track health and disease.

Journal Article Nature aging · August 2025 To understand how aging affects functional decline and increases disease risk, it is necessary to develop measures of how fast a person is aging. Using data from the Dunedin Study, we introduce an accurate and reliable measure for the rate of longitudinal ... Full text Cite

A blood biomarker of the pace of aging is associated with brain structure: replication across three cohorts.

Journal Article Neurobiology of aging · April 2024 Biological aging is the correlated decline of multi-organ system integrity central to the etiology of many age-related diseases. A novel epigenetic measure of biological aging, DunedinPACE, is associated with cognitive dysfunction, incident dementia, and m ... Full text Cite

Functional topography of the neocortex predicts covariation in complex cognitive and basic motor abilities.

Journal Article Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · June 2023 Although higher-order cognitive and lower-order sensorimotor abilities are generally regarded as distinct and studied separately, there is evidence that they not only covary but also that this covariation increases across the lifespan. This pattern has bee ... Full text Cite

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