Recently, we spoke with REC Scholar, Jenna Merenstein, a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Duke-UNC Brain Imaging and Analysis Center (BIAC), about her interest in ADRD research, her involvement with the Duke/UNC ADRC, and her future plans.

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

I am a cognitive neuroscientist focused on studying healthy aging across the adult lifespan. I am a major lover of dogs, mountains, cars, and music! I was born in Annapolis, Maryland, but did not live there for too long before relocating to Oregon, and then eventually back to the East Coast before I moved to Colorado for my undergraduate studies.

I got my start in this field 10 years ago as an undergraduate research assistant working with Dr. Agnieszka Burzynska at Colorado State University. I pursued graduate school and joined the laboratory of Dr. Ilana Bennett at the University of California, Riverside. I decided to come to Duke to complete my postdoctoral training with Dr. David Madden because I was really excited about his ongoing projects applying network neuroscience and multimodal neuroimaging approaches to better understand healthy neurocognitive aging.

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

I became involved with ADRD research by chance! I was seeking research opportunities as an undergraduate because I knew I planned to apply to graduate school, but I was uncertain about my interests. I learned about a position in Dr. Burzynska’s lab because it was advertised to me in one of my courses. In her lab, I worked on a project examining the role of physical activity on hippocampal volume and memory performance in older adults. I absolutely loved this line of work and decided this is what I wanted to focus on in graduate school. Dr. Burzynska was also a collaborator with both Dr. Bennett (my PhD advisor) and Dr. Madden (my current advisor)!

I love, love, love this field because it is extremely relatable and meaningful to most people. If you ask people in a given room if any of them know someone living with ADRD, most (if not all) of them will raise their hand. It makes me feel fulfilled to know that I am doing important work that matters to the general public.

How did you come to work with Dr. Madden and the BIAC, and become connected with the Duke/UNC ADRC?

A fun fact is that Dr. Madden was a former advisor to my PhD mentor, Dr. Bennett, and they had collaborated on several studies in the past! I was also always very well acquainted with Dr. Madden’s research as a graduate student and thought it would be an excellent opportunity to work with and learn from him. Joining the Brain Imaging and Analysis Center (BIAC) was an added benefit because it provided me access to novel, developing MRI techniques that I could apply to the

context of healthy aging and AD. Doing so allowed me to develop a unique advanced methodological approach for my research program. I then naturally became connected with the Duke/UNC ADRC because Dr. Madden and other members of the BIAC community were affiliated with the Biomarker Core. But I had always been aware of the ADRC, and it was one of the many available resources that helped me decide to pursue my postdoctoral training at Duke.

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

I have been highly active in all aspects of the ADRC. I regularly attend the monthly IDEAS forums, became a REC Scholar in 2024, and developed research collaborations with both clinical (e.g., Dr. Leah Acker, Dr. Heather Whitson, Dr. Kim Johnson) and computational (e.g., Guorong Wu) faculty members. I have also attended SLAM-DUNC each year since I joined Duke. In fact, my first poster presentation from Dr. Madden’s lab was presented at the 2022 SLAM-DUNC meeting (~two months into my postdoc position) and this helped me become acquainted with the ADRC team very early on and helped me learn about resources and funding opportunities available to me – including the REC Scholar program. I would say that one of the most impactful things from these interactions in the sense of community and belonging that I found at Duke from the very beginning of my tenure here.

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

The REC Scholar program provided me one of my initial opportunities to develop an independent grant proposal and seek funding on my own. I actually applied for the program twice and successfully received the award on my second attempt. This was invaluable professional development experience to help me prepare for life as a principal investigator. The funds provided by this award also allowed me to hire a part-time research assistant, afford article publication fees, and complete a few additional MRI scans for our adult lifespan sample. None of these opportunities would have been made possible without the support of the REC Scholar award.

My connection to the ADRC also really helped me obtain my first foray into research on ADRD. All my research to date, before coming to Duke, had focused on healthy brain aging across the adult lifespan. But a natural next step to extend this line of work was to also focus on cases of pathological brain aging. I had not yet access to patient populations in my career, and this was a wonderful opportunity to have gained from the ADRC.

What research are you doing now with Dr. Madden at Duke?

In my ongoing research with Dr. Madden, we are conducting advanced network neuroscience analyses (i.e., graph theory) of high-resolution MRI data (i.e., multi-shot diffusion-weighted imaging) as well as functional MRI data to better understand the neurobiology of healthy cognitive aging and Alzheimer’s disease. A broader goal of this work is to help identify more sensitive measures that can assist with the early identification of individuals who are at heightened risk of cognitive decline in the future. Our current analyses are primarily focused on understanding decline in visual attention (i.e., your ability to focus on target information while ignoring distractors) and fluid speed-dependent cognition (e.g., memory and perceptual-motor speed).

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

My current research and collaborations have offered some training in the development, acquisition, and interpretation of advanced MR pulse sequences. Developing faster and higher-resolution MRI sequences may allow for more accurate measures of the neurobiology underlying healthy cognitive aging, which may ultimately assist with early identification efforts of older adults who are at heightened risk for atypical cognitive decline. As an important first step toward this goal, I have gained hands-on experience with two different high-resolution diffusion-weighted imaging protocols and learned how the choice of acquisition parameters affects observed patterns of age- and AD-related differences in brain connectivity. This training will inform the future studies that I conduct by helping me decide with MRI protocols may be most sensitive to age- and AD-related differences in specific aspects of brain structure and brain function.

What are your upcoming career plans after completing your REC Scholar term in June? How has your time as a REC Scholar impacted those plans?

I have accepted a position as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Utah, starting July 1st, 2025. My laboratory is going to continue studying healthy cognitive aging across the adult lifespan using advanced MRI techniques. My lab is going to place special emphasis on recruiting and testing “oldest-old” adults (people who are beyond 80 years of age) as they represent the fastest growing segment of the population but remain highly underrepresented in MRI studies of neurocognitive aging. My predoctoral and postdoctoral work has also helped us better understand which aspects of brain structure and brain function contribute to cognitive aging, but an open question is how these patterns unfold. My lab will therefore also assess potential moderating factors of brain aging across the adult lifespan (e.g., physical activity levels, environmental exposure, genetic predispositions).

My time as a REC Scholar was absolutely fundamental to helping me secure this position because it demonstrated my potential to independently seek and obtain research funding and led to the publication of two manuscripts with compelling results that I shared during my job talks. I was also able to present my preliminary findings to the ADRC REC team and receive feedback before drafting the result into manuscript format, which ultimately strengthened the quality of the final publications.

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