Recently, we spoke with REC Scholar, Aaron Reuben, a Postdoctoral Scholar in Psychology & Neuroscience at Duke, about his interest in ADRD research, his involvement with the Duke/UNC ADRC, and his future plans.

Tell us a little bit about you, where you are from, and how you came to North Carolina.

I was born in Connecticut and raised in South Carolina. I came to North Carolina for my PhD and fell in love with the place and the people.

Tell us about how you got into ADRD research. What do you like about it?

I’ve been studying brain aging since my undergraduate days many years ago. For me ADRD research meets the current needs of our time: an aging global population that is not yet equipped to treat or manage diseases of the aging brain.

How did you come to work with the Moffitt/Caspi lab, and become connected with the Duke/UNC ADRC?

I wanted to study the interaction of the physical environment with brain health and aging across the lifespan. Terrie Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi offered the perfect training opportunity with their longitudinal birth cohort studies, one of which was entering midlife when I began. With their extraordinarily deep expertise and multidecade studies I could learn how to make connections between exposures and outcomes that may be many apart. With ADRDs especially we believe there is a long latency period – a long premorbid, preclinical phase where changes are happening in the brain that are not yet noticeable as cognitive symptoms. So long-term prospective studies offer the best research design. Plus, Drs. Moffitt and Caspi have run a warm, welcoming, dynamic team for many years.

What interactions have you had with the ADRC so far? What has been most impactful?  

I’ve attended and given talks at two SLAM DUNC events, one IDEAS Forum, and am a current REC scholar. The most impactful interactions have been with my mentors, like Kyle Walsh, who have steered my research ideas and helped me level-up my grantsmanship. I have also met potential collaborators at ADRC events, which is exciting.

What have you gained from your participation in the REC Scholar program?

The REC Scholar program has given me the opportunity to practice presentation skills, generate data that would have been impossible to create without the research support, and meet potential collaborators that, I hope, will lead to productive new discoveries.

What research are you doing now in the Moffitt/Caspi lab at Duke?

I am leading our efforts to measure the exposome at the current assessment phase of the longitudinal Dunedin Cohort Study. With the exposome data in hand at the end of the assessment we should be able to ask and answer cutting-edge questions about how physical environments may influence brain aging trajectories. We will examine neighborhood conditions, indoor air chemicals, and body burdens of heavy metals. It is very exciting.

What future work is being informed by your current research and collaborations?

I am most excited to integrate epigenetic analyses into my work moving forward – conducting exposome-wide and epigenome-wide analyses in relation to brain health changes over time.

What are your upcoming career plans after completing your REC Scholar term in February?

I have accepted an Assistant Professorship at the University of Virginia and will move to recruit my first students and open a lab of Environmental Neuropsychiatric Epidemiology. This has been my dream for many years and the dream is coming true – thanks in part to the mentorship and research support of the REC scholarship.

Congratulations, Aaron! The Duke/UNC ADRC wishes you all the best as you start this new chapter.