Rachel Whitmer, PhD, is an adjunct investigator at the Divison of Research and Professor of Public Health Sciences at the UC Davis School of Medicine, where she is also Chief of the Division of Epidemiology, and Director of Epidemiology Core Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. Dr. Whitmer received her BS in Psychology/Neuorscience Magna Cum Laude from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, her PhD in Human Development from the University of California, Davis, and Fellowship in Cardiovascular Epidemiology at the School of Public Health, University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Whitmer was a K12 scholar through the NIH Office of Research in Women’s Health Building Interdisciplinary Research Careers in Women’s Health (BIRCWH) program, administered by the Division of Research at Kaiser Permanente and the University of California, San Francisco, from 2003-2005. She was a Fulbright Faculty Mentor in 2010-11.
Dr. Whitmer leads a laboratory of population-based science in brain aging. Her group focuses on three major themes: 1) Ethnoracial disparities and diversity in cognitive aging and dementia outcomes; 2) Early-life contributions to brain health and dementia risk; and 3) Metabolic and vascular influences on brain aging. Her group utilizes lifecourse methods to address these themes. Dr. Whitmer is Principal Investigator of several studies, among them the SOLID (Study of Longevity in Diabetes), a cohort study of 1200 individuals with diabetes mellitus; KHANDLE (Kaiser Healthy Aging and Diverse Life Experiences), a multiethnic cohort of 1,800 elderly individuals; and Kaiser STAR (Study of Healthy Aging in African Americans), a cohort of 700 African Americans age 50 and older. The primary objective of her research program is to identify and understand risk and protective factors for cognitive and brain aging in populations at high risk for dementia, including ethnic minority groups and those with chronic disease such as diabetes mellitus.
Dr. Whitmer is also on the faculty at University of California, San Francisco, in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics and is core faculty on the department’sChronic Disease and Aging Epidemiology T32, and the PhD program inEpidemiology and Translational Sciences. Multiple mentoring opportunities exist through this and other mechanisms.
