Our Team
Allison Aiello, PhD
James S. Jackson Healthy Longevity Professor of Epidemiology (in the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center)
Interim Director, Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center
Dr. Aiello’s research explores how social, psychological, and infectious exposures shape trajectories of healthy aging, cognition, and the risk of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, with the goal of identifying actionable points for intervention. A central focus of her work examines life course exposures and immune system aging (immunosenescence) as a critical pathway linking early stressors to later-life health outcomes.
As Deputy Director of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), Dr. Aiello spearheaded the development of the Add Health Cognitive Assessment, Physical and Sensory Function protocol (“Add CAPS”). This innovative protocol was administered to more than 2,000 participants nationwide and combined gold-standard cognitive measures- such as delayed word recall, digit span, and animal naming- with cutting-edge digital neuropsychological tools. Under her leadership, digital assessments were also integrated into the full Add Health survey, generating a landmark neurocognitive dataset of nearly 12,000 participants in early middle age- the first of its kind at this scale. In addition, Dr. Aiello directed the collection of physical and sensory function measures, including grip strength and hearing, which provide key early indicators of cognitive decline in Add Health. Together, these efforts have expanded the scientific community’s capacity to investigate the early emergence of biological and social pathways to cognitive aging and dementia risk, paving the way for new interventions to promote brain health across the life course.
Meet the Team
Cherese Parker
- Research Director
Cherese Parker is currently the Project Director for the Aiello Research Group (ARG) at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. Since joining the Columbia University ARG team in 2022, Cherese has worked to lead multiple domestic and international studies, her role includes managing funding sources, overseeing IRB, DUA, and MTA initiation and compliance, managing field work operations and overseeing the ARG biobank. Prior to beginning her work at Columbia University, Cherese worked with Dr. Aiello as a Research Project Manager at UNC Gillings (2018–2022) and held clinical and laboratory research roles at East Carolina University prior to that. Cherese Parker holds an MPH in Health Behavior from UNC-Chapel Hill, a graduate certificate in Health Communication, and a BS in Exercise Physiology from East Carolina University. Honors include Staff Excellence Awards and multiple scholarship recognitions.
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Kamaryn Tanner
- Associate Research Scientist in the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center
Kamaryn Tanner joined the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center in 2023 and the Aiello Research Group in 2025. She works with large longitudinal and cross-sectional cohort datasets to study biological aging, inflammaging, and persistent infections. Dr Tanner has expertise in clinical prediction models, survival analysis, mediation analysis, conducting simulation studies and application of novel statistical methods. She holds a PhD in biostatistics from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Prior to completing her PhD, she held senior quantitative, analytics development and product management roles at software firms serving banks, broker-dealers and wealth management firms.
![Profile Headshot]( "Kamaryn Tanner")
Aanya Bahl
- Project Coordinator
Aanya Bahl is a project coordinator in the Aiello Research Group and works with both data and administrative teams. Her academic and research background centers on blood-based biomarkers of Alzheimer’s disease, cognitive methodology, interpretation of diagnostic tests, and the role of comorbidities in large populations. She holds a Master’s degree in Epidemiology and is especially interested in translating complex data into insights that advance both science and practice.
Manjari Madhusudanan
- Project Coordinator
Manjari Madhusudanan is a Project Coordinator in the Aiello Research Group at the Columbia Aging Center. Her work spans project management, data coordination, and research operations across studies focused on aging, cognition, and population health. She has multidisciplinary background in clinical medicine, epidemiology, and research operations with experience leading complex, multi-site projects. Her interests lie in life course epidemiology, health equity, and the intersection of social determinants, data systems, and aging-related outcomes. She holds an MBBS from the Government Medical College Kozhikode, India and an MPH in Epidemiology from Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health with a certificate in Health Policy.
Farizah Rob
- Biostatistician
Farizah Rob is a Staff Associate and Biostatistician in the Aiello Research Group. She conducts day-to-day data management and quality control across multiple projects, including the AddCAPS section of the Add Health study. Additionally, she supports and frequently leads statistical analyses for ongoing manuscripts.
Farizah's research interests lie at the intersection of social epidemiology, biological aging, and cognitive health. She received her BS in Statistics from the University of Michigan in 2021 and an MS in Biostatistics from the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health in 2024. She conducted her MS thesis with Dr. Aiello, studying social relationships and immunosenescence in the Add Health Study.
Youngjoon Bae
- Postdoctoral Research Scientist in the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center
- Affiliated Researcher in the Carolina Population Center at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Youngjoon Bae is a Postdoctoral Research Scientist with the Aiello Research Group (ARG) at the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. Since joining ARG in 2024, he has contributed to data quality checks of Add Health Wave VI and grant writing for Add Health Wave VII. His current research focuses on how social and behavioral factors, such as widowhood, early-life chickenpox infection, and shingles vaccination, relate to immune system aging and epigenetic aging. He is currently working on two manuscripts in this area. Additionally, Dr. Bae has investigated the impact of cash transfers on cognitive function in Malawi. He earned his PhD in Sociology from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He previously served as a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Center on Aging & Population Sciences (CAPS) at the University of Texas at Austin.
![Profile Headshot]( "Youngjoon Bae")
Jennifer Momkus
- Post-Doctoral Research Scientist
Jennifer Momkus, MPH, PhD is an epidemiologist and postdoctoral research scientist at the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center. She works extensively with data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) to investigate early-life and midlife determinants of aging-related outcomes. Her research focuses on the biosocial mechanisms linking life course exposures to outcomes such as biological aging, immunosenescence, and cognitive function. Her work integrates biomarker, epigenetic, and population-based approaches to understand how social and biological processes jointly shape trajectories of aging and risk for age-related outcomes such as Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias.
Maya Krishnamoorthy
- Research Assistant
Maya is a second-year M.S. candidate in the Biostatistics department on the Public Health Data Science track at Mailman. She currently works with Dr. Aiello on the Add Health study primarily, where her work includes implementing data science methods for analytical research Her current projects focus on the relationship between caregiving and cognitive aging, as well as the impact of lifecourse socioeconomic status on biological aging. She also contributes to exploratory data science initiatives, such as building an AI agent for research purposes specific to ARG. Maya is particularly interested in applying modern data science tools to epidemiologic research, with an emphasis on developing measures for chronic disease and Alzheimer’s disease-related dementias.
Rawan Ajeen
- Variable Hours Officer
Rawan Ajeen joined the Aiello Research Group in 2026. Her research focuses on how biological, behavioral, and social factors interact to shape cardiometabolic health and aging across the life course. Her work integrates epidemiologic and clinical intervention approaches to study chronic disease and health disparities. She has examined population-specific anthropometric thresholds for obesity and cardiometabolic disease using data from the Qatar Biobank and investigated how food insecurity and socioeconomic conditions influence long-term health in diverse populations, including work in Yemen and the Cebu Longitudinal Health and Nutrition Survey. She has also contributed to a clinical trial in North Carolina addressing food insecurity, reflecting her interest in translating population-level findings into real-world interventions. She earned her PhD in Nutrition from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Alumni
Rebecca Stebbins
- Associate Research Scientist in the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center
Dr. Rebecca C. Stebbins was an Associate Research Scientist at Columbia University’s Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center, where her work focused on the social determinants and biological mechanisms underpinning cognitive aging. Her research integrates life course epidemiology, immunosenescence, health disparities, and causal inference, examining how patterns of disadvantage accumulate across the lifespan and manifest in cognitive outcomes among aging individuals.
Dr. Stebbins has contributed to studies investigating associations between risk factors, ATN biomarkers, and cognitive function in young to mid‑adulthood, demonstrating that Alzheimer’s disease–related indicators are impactful decades before clinical onset. She has also examined the aging immune system in older adults, focusing on sex- and race/ethnicity‑specific patterns in immune aging and all‑cause mortality using nationally representative data. Her scholarly work examines the interplay of cognitive, biological, and social factors across the life course, including occupational cognitive stimulation, early-life cognitive development, multisystem biomarkers of aging, immune function, and the impacts of stress, adversity, and other life experiences on cognitive and health outcomes.
Dr. Stebbins earned her PhD in Epidemiology (2020) and MSPH in Epidemiology (2017) from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and her AB in Biology with a minor in International Studies from Dartmouth College (2011).
![Profile Headshot]( "Rebecca Stebbins")
Denis Leang
Denis earned an M.S. in Data Science from Columbia University in 2024. He worked with Dr. Aiello to develop voice audio recognition machine learning models and LLM-powered AI agents, which are designed to retrieve and synthesize public health data from research databases, enhancing information retrieval efficiency and reducing search times.
Jasmine Lo
Jasmine was a M.S. Data Science student at Columbia University's Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science. She worked with Dr. Aiello to develop speech-to-text machine learning models for verbal fluency tests and LLM-powered AI agents for retrieving and synthesizing public health data from research databases.
Devdatt Golwala
