Melissa Lamar, Ph.D.

Melissa Lamar, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Rush University Medical Center, and a Clinical Neuropsychologist in the Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center. She received her Ph.D. in Clinical Neuropsychology from Drexel University and completed her postdoctoral training in Cognitive Neuroscience within the intramural program of the Laboratory of Behavioral Neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging. She worked at the Institute of Psychiatry King's College London and the University of Illinois at Chicago prior to joining the Rush faculty in 2016. Her research focuses on cardiovascular disease risk factors, brain aging and cognition with a particular focus on Latinos and African Americans. Dr. Lamar employs novel neuroimaging and data analytic techniques to identify modifiable factors associated with health disparities in brain aging. Additionally, she incorporates translational tasks and digital technology into her work assessing cognitive functioning in order to strengthen the accuracy of her work. Together with the Boston Process Approach to Neuropsychology, Dr. Lamar is able to detect subtle alterations in behavior and pin-point their roots in brain. Dr. Lamar has published extensively on brain-behavior profiles of risk and disease in aging and has received numerous honors and awards for her work including Fellows status of the American Psychological Association and the 2017 Arthur Benton Award for Mid-Career Research from the International Neuropsychological Society.