Heather Elizabeth Whitson

Dr. Whitson is a geriatrician, memory care specialist, and clinical researcher.  Her career is focused on improving care options and resilience for people with multiple chronic conditions.  In particular, she has interest and expertise related to how aging biology and comorbidities impact brain health and risk for Alzheimer's disease. She is co-director of the Duke/UNC Alzheimer's Disease Research Center (Duke/UNC ADRC), which aims to transform dementia care and research in Eastern North Carolina while developing novel preventions and treatment strategies for Alzheimer's disease by identifying aging-related factors across the lifespan that drive risk, progression, or experience of dementia. The Duke/UNC ADRC conducts the Memory and Aging Study, which is tracking brain and cognitive changes in over 400 individuals at risk for dementia in later life.  Dr. Whitson also co-Chairs the Alzheimer's Association's Clinical Practice Guideline panel for the use of blood-based biomarkers in the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease. As a thought leader in a national collaborative focused on the biomedical aspects of resilience, Dr. Whitson seeks to better understand biological, psychological, and contextual factors that determine how well we "bounce back" after acute health stressors and why our resilience capacity changes with age. Dr. Whitson has contributed to work examining resilience to many types of health stressors, including surgery, dialysis, infection, vascular events, and vision loss - often focused on how these stressors affect the brain.  She has led multiple studies to examine how the aging brain responds to the late-life stressor of vision loss, and she has developed a rehabilitation model to improve independence in older adults living with comorbid impairments in vision and cognition.