Marcia P. Jimenez, affiliated faculty with the Boston University Institute for Global Sustainability (IGS), received her PhD in epidemiology from the Brown University School of Public Health and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in cardiovascular disease and environmental epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She has a multidisciplinary research portfolio that includes spatial epidemiology, life-course analysis, health disparities, cardiovascular disease, and aging, specifically, geographic contextual factors and modifiers of cognitive decline and dementia. Her early work evaluated the relationship between greenspace and hypertension among adults. More recently, she has extended this to examine mediation analysis between greenspace and cognitive function.
Her current work focuses on novel metrics of greenspace and the urban environment using Deep Learning Algorithms and Google Street View images to examine the association between the natural environment and Alzheimer’s Disease and related dementias. She has extensive experience working with several cohort studies, including the New England Family Study, Project Viva, the Nurses Health Studies, and the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis. She is currently funded through a K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award from the National Institute on Aging which aims to quantify the role of the built and natural environment on cognitive functioning and Alzheimer’s disease risk, evaluating racial/ethnic disparities.