Peter Millar, PhD

My long-term career goal is to become an independent researcher investigating the effects of healthy aging and dementing illness (e.g., Alzheimer disease [AD]) on the brain and cognition. Although my initial training was in basic cognitive neuroscience and cognitive aging, I am motivated to pursue projects with clinical translational utility in the effort to develop personalized indicators and predictors of preclinical AD pathology, as well as tools to evaluate AD clinical interventions. Further, I am drawn to research that seeks to reveal mechanistic process underlying cognitive decline. To that end, I completed my PhD in Psychological & Brain Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL) with Dr. David Balota, where I evaluated theoretically-driven cognitive processes in relation to aging, AD dementia, and preclinical AD biomarkers. Further, I supplemented my foundation in cognitive psychology with transdisciplinary training in systems neuroscience and biomedical engineering, which prepared me to approach aging and AD research questions from a multi-disciplinary perspective, incorporating both neuroimaging techniques and machine learning analytic tools. Now, as a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Neurology at WUSTL, my current projects are designed to further develop my expertise with additional neuroimaging modalities, characterization of early-stage and preclinical AD, as well as more advanced machine learning methodologies.