Matthew D Grilli
University of Arizona, AZ·Neuroscience
The earliest stage of Alzheimer's disease is usually called "clinically silent" because standard tests in a clinic find nothing wrong. Yet the brain changes of early Alzheimer's strike regions that support the way people remember their own past and imagine their own future.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Psychology
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
Alzheimer's disease
autobiographical memory
autobiographical thought
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2028
What they work on
- Test whether smartphone-tracked autobiographical thoughts in clinically normal older adults relate to plasma Alzheimer's biomarkers and to resting-state connectivity of the default network, brain regions targeted early in the disease.
- Determine whether these smartphone measures predict future accumulation of plasma amyloid and tau biomarkers, future default network connectivity and decline in daily psychosocial and instrumental functioning over longitudinal follow-up.
- Deploy a smartphone app to a large remote, genotyped cohort to assess how age and genetic risk for Alzheimer's disease shape the content and structure of autobiographical thought at scale.
- Compare smartphone measures of autobiographical thought against standard in-lab cognitive tests to determine whether naturalistic assessment improves sensitivity to aging and Alzheimer's risk.
More about the research
That raises a question with practical consequences: could subtle changes in everyday personal thinking reveal the disease before any clinical sign appears? Detecting it earlier matters because treatment works best before damage accumulates.
Why it matters
Alzheimer's disease is the fifth leading cause of death among older Americans, and catching its earliest cognitive warning signs is key to treating it proactively. Smartphone-based measures of everyday personal thinking could become accessible, low-cost tests of preclinical Alzheimer's, provide new cognitive endpoints for drug trials, and reduce barriers to cognitive assessment for people who cannot easily reach a research clinic or memory center.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jessica Alber
University of Rhode Island, RI·Neuroscience
Identify differences in retinal imaging measures between older adults with preclinical Alzheimer's disease and cognitively unimpaired peers in the ARIAS cohort.
Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli
Northeastern University, MA·Psychology
Test whether mindfulness-based real-time fMRI neurofeedback engages its intended brain target by reducing hyperconnectivity within the default mode network, the circuit active during inward self-focused thought, in adolescents aged 13 to 18 with major depressive disorder.
Lauren Rutter
Indiana University, IN·Psychology·Early-career
Examine how cognitive performance, perceived stress and psychiatric symptoms relate across individuals and over time, in an existing sample from the Indiana Alzheimer's Disease Research Center.
The school
University of Arizona: 36 labs on PI Pages, $1.0B a year on research, 487 research doctorates a year.
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