Dr. Alyssa Gamaldo is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at Clemson University and affiliated with the Institute for Engaged Aging. Her current research concentrates on social determinants of health and well-being in older adult populations, particularly within populations at risk for dementia. Her research has also focused on identifying sensitive measures for detecting health risks. Dr. Gamaldo serves as the Deputy Editor of The Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences.

Rodlescia Sneed is a social gerontologist whose work focuses on how social environments shape adult development and aging among historically marginalized midlife and older adult populations. Their research uses a multilevel approach to examine how individual, interpersonal, institutional, community, and public policy factors influence health outcomes. They also collaborate with community and institutional stakeholders to address gaps that contribute to inequities in health and well-being.

Dr. Regina Wright is a psychologist and professor in the Department of Health Behavior and Nutrition Sciences at the University of Delaware. Her program of research is focused on cardiovascular, psychosocial, and environmental predictors of cognitive function and decline, with a specific focus on patterns of association in African Americans. Most recently, Dr. Wright has examined neighborhood disadvantage and cognitive function among older adults, including potential mediating and moderating influences on this relationship.

Dr. Samuele Zilioli is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Psychology and Family Medicine & Public Health Sciences at Wayne State University. He completed his B.A. and M.A. in Psychology at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Italy and earned his Ph.D. in Cognitive and Neural Sciences from Simon Fraser University in Canada, where he received the Governor General’s Gold Medal for highest academic standing. He later completed a postdoctoral fellowship in health psychology at Wayne State. Dr. Zilioli’s research examines how psychosocial stressors, especially those tied to socioeconomic status and race/ethnicity, interact with psychosocial resources to influence glucocorticoid-related processes and, in turn, immune, cardiovascular, metabolic, and other health outcomes across the lifespan. His work has been funded by the National Institute of Justice and is currently supported by the National Institutes of Health. He has received several honors recognizing his contributions to biobehavioral health research.

Jordana Breton is a fourth-year doctoral candidate studying Clinical Psychology with an emphasis in Neuropsychology at the University of Texas at Austin (UTA). She graduated from San Diego State University with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology. She worked at the HIV Neurobehavioral Research Program (HNRP) as a bilingual research psychometrist before attending UTA. She is interested in examining the role socioeconomic and sociocultural factors may have on stress, stress-related diseases, and cognition. She hopes to create valuable research and tools geared towards minimizing cognitive health disparities in underserved/underprivileged communities.

Jinshil Hyun, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Her research focuses on identifying modifiable determinants of cognitive aging and dementia, with an emphasis on how neighborhood and contextual factors interact with psychosocial and behavioral processes to shape cognitive health across multiple time scales (e.g., momentary, daily, and longitudinal). She is the Principal Investigator of two funded projects: a National Institute on Aging K99/R00 award (K99/R00AG080126), “Neighborhood Characteristics, GPS-Based Activity Space, and Cognitive Health,” and an Alzheimer’s Association Research Fellowship (23AARF-1020416), “Pathways Linking Neighborhood and Behavioral Factors to the Risk of Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementia (ADRD).” Her work leverages digital technologies, including smartphone-based ambulatory cognitive assessments, to capture real-world experiences and environmental exposures that influence cognitive health in later life.

Dr. Kamis is an Assistant Professor in Sociology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research explores early life predictors of life course mental health, with recent publications focusing on the long-term impacts of childhood adversity. A separate but related stream of research examines how contexts (e.g., neighborhoods, counties, states) influence health and mental health disparities more broadly.

Dr. Ye is an assistant professor in the School of Social Work and the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Her research focuses on how social, structural, and environmental contexts shape health outcomes in vulnerable aging populations, with a particular interest in sleep disturbance and dementia care. Dr. Ye’s work integrates interdisciplinary approaches from sociology, health services research, and data science to identify modifiable determinants of health and inform evidence-based interventions for older adults living in community and long-term care settings.