Common Data Elements Webinar Series

Upcoming Webinars

Learn about and register to attend upcoming webinars below.

Dec. 6, 2024 | Harmonization of Cognition Assessment Measures

Time: 4:00–5:00 p.m. ET

This webinar will cover the best practices for accurate harmonization of cognitive data from assessment measures with highlights about how harmonization of cognitive measures can facilitate future investigation of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) and Alzheimer’s Disease-Related Dementias (ADRD) cross-national differences in cognitive performance.

The speaker is Jinkook Lee, Ph.D. , Research Professor of Economics & Program Director of Global Aging, Health & Policy, Center for Economic & Social Research, University of Southern California. Her research focuses on the economics of aging, with interdisciplinary training and expertise in large-scale population surveys. As the Principal Investigator on several NIH-funded grants, she laid the groundwork for studying Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementia and their risk factors and impacts in low and middle-income countries. She has developed the country’s first and only population representative dementia study in India and helped developing sister studies in Kenya, Nepal, Pakistan, and Malawi. She provides scientific advice for WHO, OECD, World Bank, and Asia Development Bank and serves on and the editorial boards for several scientific journals. She previously held a professorship at Ohio State University and the Pardee RAND Graduate School. She received her Ph.D. from Ohio State University and B.S. from Seoul National University.

Past Webinars

View past recordings and other information for past webinars below.

July 12, 2024 | Data Harmonization of Large Digital Technology Datasets for Aging and Dementia Research in the Context of Short Technology Life Cycles

This webinar will discussed the linkage of common data elements (CDEs) with large digital technology datasets for aging and dementia research with highlights about effective approaches towards applying CDEs for data harmonization.

The speaker was Rhoda Au, Ph.D. , Professor, Anatomy and Neurobiology, Neurology, Medicine and Epidemiology, Boston University Chobanian and Avedisian School of Medicine and School of Public Health. Her research interests are focused on aging and dementia and include relating cardiovascular risk factors, brain MRI measures, and neuropathology to cognitive performance. She serves as on the Principle Investigators of the Framingham Heart Study Brain Aging Program and is Director of Neuropsychology. She received her doctoral degree from University of California in Psychology.

June 7, 2024 | Application of Computational Data Harmonization Approaches to Study the Structure and Function of Alzheimer's Disease and Alzheimer's Disease Related Dementias (AD/ADRD)

This webinar discussed computational infrastructure to support processing of many harmonized Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) and Alzheimer’s Disease-Related Dementias (ADRD) data and the computational infrastructure needed to support data harmonization with highlights about effective approaches towards studying the structure and function of AD/ADRD.

The speaker was Tim Hohman, Ph.D. , Associate Professor of Neurology, Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Dr. Hohman is an Associate Professor of Neurology, cognitive neuroscientist, and computational geneticist with secondary appointments in the Vanderbilt Genetics Institute and Department of Pharmacology. He leverages advanced computational approaches from genomics, proteomics, and neuroscience to identify novel markers of Alzheimer’s disease risk and resilience. He received his doctoral degree in neuroscience from American University focusing on cognitive and neural changes during normal aging.

May 3, 2024 | Systematic Data Harmonization Enabled by Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Large Language Models (LLM)

This webinar discussed the application of generative artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and large language models (LLM) for systematizing data harmonization. It also highlighted how to address inconsistencies and the lack of data standardization that hinders the ability to effectively utilize data for building ML use cases. The webinar also covered conventional approaches to tackling this challenge while leveraging the power of AI, ML, and LLM.

The speaker was Mike Nalls, Ph.D. , Project Lead, Advanced Analytics, Intramural Center for Alzheimer's and Related Dementias, NIA. Dr. Nalls in the project lead for the Center for Alzheimer’s and Related Dementia (CARD), Advanced Analytics, and advances open science to fight neurodegenerative diseases through CARD (an initiative of the National Institute on Aging) while building and deploying scalable advanced analytics systems. His research focuses on aspects of population genetics and inherent genetic aspects of population structure associated with neurodegenerative diseases. He received his doctoral degree from Temple University focused on quantitative trait association methods and population genetic structure.

April 16, 2024 | Data Harmonization in Research on Epidemiology of Aging

This webinar discussed the use of common data elements (CDEs) to harmonize data for the epidemiology of aging research including highlights about CDE best practices for harmonizing measures and different approaches to harmonization in order to conduct pooled data analyses.

The speaker was Michelle Shardell, Ph.D. , Professor, Institute for Genome Sciences and Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, University of Maryland School of Medicine. Dr. Shardell is a biostatistician with a history of NIA funding who cross-fertilizes biostatistical expertise and aging research. Her interdisciplinary biostatistics in aging research includes refining structural models to assess the relation of blood biomarkers with aging-related outcomes, developing novel statistical methods to handle survival bias and unmeasured confounding in studies of older adults, adapting machine-learning methods in pooled-cohort projects, using machine-learning methods to identify clinically meaningful thresholds for sarcopenia and vitamin D deficiency, treating the use of proxy respondents as a missing-data problem, combining epidemiologically rigorous methods with -omics data, and developing time-to-event methods with informative censoring. She received her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, Biostatistics.

Contact Information

Please contact Dr. Karyn Onyeneho or Irim Azam for questions you may have about the webinars.