My name's Stephanie Kielb.
I'm a clinical psychology graduate student here at Northwestern University in the Cognitive
Neurology and Alzheimer's Disease Center.
We do a lot of studies related to aging and Dementia, specifically Alzheimer's Disease
and potential ways to help prevent and treat people who have Alzheimer's Disease and Dementia.
It's nice to feel like we're helping and contributing to a cause that's so important.
I was born and raised in a small town in central Pennsylvania called Lancaster.
It's just outside of Philadelphia.
I went to high school there.
Then I went to Baltimore, Maryland for my undergrad at Johns Hopkins.
There I studied public health and psychology and became really interested in the field
of psychology and studying people and the way that they think and behave.
I ended up working on this study of people who have ALS or Lou Gehrig's Disease.
It was just working directly with patients.
The idea that we were learning about things that weren't known about the disease and that
what we were going to discover would ultimately help these patients and their families who
you could see were just suffering so much.
That's really what made me want to continue with research and go to graduate school and
keep doing studies.
Because you're learning information that we don't know and can help people.
The broader goal of my research would really be early identification of people who have
Dementia.
Identifying them at an early stage before they develop really big symptoms.
My dissertation study is looking at older adults who have what we call subjective cognitive
decline.
People who think they're having problems with their memory but who are actually performing
normally on cognitive tests may be at the earliest, earliest stages of Alzheimer's Disease.
We're studying what personality factors and emotional factors are associated with people
who have a subjective complaint to see if we can help characterize people who may be
at risk for developing Dementia later on.
I'm specifically looking at different tests that are non-invasive and would be cost effective
so that we could screen people who are at early stages but also may be in lower resource
areas.
So don't necessarily have the money to get an expensive scan or other medical procedures.
But we could still get the same information from them and be able to make early diagnoses
in all sorts of groups.
Something I'm really interested in is education and working with not only patients but also
their families.
In research you get the really unique aspect of doing work that serves patients but also
helps their families because a lot times people with Dementia their spouses and their children
and other family members have a huge amount of stress and burden.
We're able to speak with them and educate them and provide support that may be able
to help them, at least a little bit, in their really difficult time.
I would encourage anyone thinking about going into the medical field to read about what
it is that interests them and keep studying and lookup some of the research that's being
done on whatever it is that interests them.
Whether it's a certain disease or a certain group of people.
For me thinking about memory and the way that people think.
But whatever it is that interests a person I would say to continue reading and just explore
your curiosity.
If it's something you're really interested in then you may consider looking at a research
lab at a local university and trying to volunteer.
Or work in a lab and get some experience to research and you can see what the day to day
aspects of science are like.
See that they're pretty great.