Kristine Yaffe, MD
Dr. Kristine Yaffe attended Yale University for her undergraduate degree and the University of Pennsylvania for her medical degree. She then completed residencies in both Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Yaffe is the Scola Endowed Chair and Vice Chair, Professor of Psychiatry, Neurology, and Epidemiology, and Director of the Center for Population Brain Health at the University of California, San Francisco. In her research, clinical work, and mentoring, she has directed her efforts towards improving the care of patients with Alzheimer’s and other dementias.
Dr. Yaffe is an internationally recognized expert in the epidemiology of dementia and cognitive aging. She serves as PI of almost a dozen NIH, Department of Defense, Veterans Administration, and foundation grants and is the foremost leader in identifying modifiable risk factors for dementia. She was the first to determine that potentially 30% of dementia risk is preventable. She pioneered early investigations on the roles of estrogen, physical activity, and cardiovascular factors in dementia risk, and more recently, her research group has led work on the connections between traumatic brain injury and risk of developing dementia and other neurodegenerative outcomes. With almost 600 peer-reviewed articles dedicated to improving population brain health (H-index=144), her transformative research bridges neurology, psychiatry, and epidemiology and has formed the cornerstone for dementia prevention trials worldwide. In recognition of her groundbreaking work, Dr. Yaffe received the Potamkin Prize for Alzheimer’s Research in 2017 and was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2019.