Priya Palta, PhD

Priya Palta received her PhD and MHS in epidemiology from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and completed an NHLBI T32 postdoctoral fellowship in cardiovascular disease epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is formally trained as a chronic disease and aging epidemiologist with a multidisciplinary research portfolio in the epidemiology of cardiovascular disease and aging, specifically, cardiovascular risk factors and modifiers of cognitive decline and dementia.

Her early work evaluated the relationship between cognition and diabetes among older adults. More recently, she has extended this to examine associations between lifecourse sociodemographic and cardiovascular health metrics and subclinical measures of cardiovascular disease with cognitive and physical function outcomes. Her current work focuses on the role of modifiable risk factors, such as physical activity, on cognition, physical function and quality of life metrics. She has extensive experience working with several population-based studies, including, the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities Study, National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, and Hispanic Community Health Study/Study of Latinos. 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 regular physical activity in reducing age-related impairment in cognitive functioning and Alzheimer's disease risk.