Lewina Lee, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry and clinical research psychologist at the National Center for PTSD at VA Boston, has received a five-year, $3.5 million, R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Institute on Aging to establish the Boston Early Adversity and Mortality Study (BEAMS).

Dr. Lee, along with co-principal investigator Daniel Mroczek, PhD, professor of Medical Social Sciences and director of the Lifespan Personality and Health lab at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, will build a unique “cradle-to-grave” dataset that tracks the life span of three Boston-based cohorts of men who have been followed by researchers for more than half a century, and augment the dataset with information on their siblings. Using this rich dataset, the study team will evaluate whether and how childhood adversity in the socioeconomic, environmental and psychosocial domains bring about Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, cardiometabolic disease and premature death in later life.