Deborah Blacker

Biography

Deborah Blacker in 1992 Harvard School of Public Health*,M.D., 1984, Harvard Medical School,Professor in the Department of Epidemiology Dr. Blacker is Deputy Chair and Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at HSPH, and Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She is a geriatric psychiatrist and epidemiologist based at Mass General Hospital, where she directs the Gerontology Research Unit and serves Associate Chief for Research in the Department of Psychiatry. Her work focuses on the epidemiology, genetics, assessment, and early recognition of Alzheimer’s disease, and she serves as co-leader of the Education and Clinical Cores for the Mass Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, and leader of the Analytic Core for the Harvard Aging Brain Study investigating earliest brain changes in Alzheimer’s disease. She is involved in multiple local and national studies regarding Alzheimer’s disease genetics and epidemiology, and leads the AlzRisk project to develop a curated online catalog of Alzheimer risk factor studies (www.alzrisk.org). She is also actively involved in teaching and methodologic research at HSPH, where she co-directs the Psychiatric Epidemiology concentration and teaches a course on assessment methods in psychiatric epidemiologic research. She served on the DSM-5 Neurocognitive Disorders Workgroup, and the American Psychiatric Association’s Workgroup to Revise the Practice Guideline for Dementia.

Research Interest

geriatric psychiatrist epidemiologist epidemiology genetics