Dr. María Corrada is a Professor in the Department of Neurology and the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California, Irvine. She is also leader of the 90+ Core at the UCI Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. She received her bachelor’s degree at the University of Puerto Rico, and completed a masters in Biostatistics and a doctorate in Psychiatric Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore, MD. Early in her career, she worked on projects involving the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging, including some of the earliest prospective studies of estrogen replacement therapy, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, and folate as protective factors for Alzheimer’s disease.
She moved to UCI to help establish The 90+ Study, for which she is a multiple principal investigator. The 90+ Study is a longitudinal epidemiological study of aging and dementia of more than 2,000 well-characterized people aged 90 years and older. Some of her most important contributions have been estimating prevalence and incidence of dementia, as well as investigating the role of multiple pathologies to dementia in this age group. In addition, Dr. Corrada is multiple principal investigator for Life After 90 a recently established life-course study of cognitive impairment and dementia in a racially and ethnically diverse cohort of over 1,000 people aged 90 and older in Northern California.
Dr. Corrada’s research interests include population-based longitudinal studies, the epidemiology of dementia, and through imaging and autopsy studies, identifying factors that correlate with the presence of brain pathologies. Much of her work has been dedicated to understanding the cognitive and physical health of the oldest-old, a rapidly growing, but understudied population.
University of California, Irvine