As a child, Beth Shaaban watched her mother, a nurse, open one of the first memory units in a long-term care facility in Sun City, Arizona. The compassionate care she witnessed there later catalyzed her own career in Alzheimer’s disease and dementia research.
“Sometimes I would go with her to work as a kid and meet the folks who were there, and it felt very natural to me,” Shaaban said. “I’ve always had an affinity for helping people that way.”
Through her community outreach and research, Shaaban helps people experiencing—or at risk of developing—dementia. Her work with the University of Pittsburgh’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (ADRC) squashes stigmas that prevent people from monitoring their cognitive health. As director of the ADRC’s Outreach, Recruitment and Engagement Core, she promotes health screenings and community initiatives that can catch Alzheimer’s, and other types of dementia, earlier.
Since joining the University of Pittsburgh School of Nursing as an assistant professor in August 2025, Shaaban has continued to research how social, behavioral and biological factors affect brain health. With each new study, she hopes to chip away at a lingering mystery in Alzheimer’s and dementia research: Why do these conditions disproportionately affect certain groups of people, particularly women and African Americans?
To find that answer, she’s looking at brain biology and beyond. Her research explores how biomarkers for dementia are influenced by social drivers that can hurt brain health, including everything from access to education and employment to life experiences with war, natural disasters and displacement.
An academic fusion
Shaaban’s multidisciplinary background positions her well for this task. After earning a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Pittsburgh, Shaaban started working at the ADRC, where she was trained to evaluate people who potentially have dementia.
She loved asking and answering research questions and “caught the bug” for going back to school, ultimately reenrolling at Pitt and earning master’s degrees in public health and neuroscience and a PhD in epidemiology.
“My pathway has been one that has sampled a variety of disciplines, and that's been really beneficial to me,” Shaaban said. “I am able to fuse the behavioral and the brain, but through this very community- and population-oriented approach.”
Ever since her PhD program, she has specialized in population neuroscience, a multidisciplinary field that explores brain development, health and disease across different populations. Using the advanced neuroimaging techniques available at Pitt, Shaaban developed a method to trace the small veins in older adults’ brains, enabling her to study how vascular health is linked to brain and cognitive health.
During her postdoc in Pitt’s School of Public Health, Shaaban studied small vessel disease in the brain, which can cause cognitive impairment and amplify symptoms related to Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. Then, she noticed something that altered the course of her research.
“I observed that women seemed to have a greater burden of white matter hyperintensities, which is a measure of small vessel disease in the brain, and I also knew that women are at greater risk for Alzheimer's disease,” Shaaban said. “I wanted to understand if small vessel disease and Alzheimer's disease were tracking together for women, and that's really where my research deepened.”
‘More work to do’
Shaaban is still studying sex and gender differences in small vessel and Alzheimer's disease, but her focus has evolved. She is especially interested in the unique “overlay” of different factors—not just sex and gender, but also identities like race and ethnicity, an individual’s amount of education and quality of education, and lived experiences with poverty and stress.
Shaaban said it is not enough to consider these factors in isolation because they may shape a person’s “cognitive profile” in unique ways. The drivers of Alzheimer’s disease can differ from one population to the next, with research indicating that Black populations have more vascular changes in the brain compared to the predominantly protein-related changes seen in white populations with Alzheimer’s disease.
Understanding how these pathways to dementia diverge is an important key to improving prevention and providing more personalized treatment plans.
“It's difficult to keep considering risk factors, or certain characteristics of individuals, in isolation from one another when they are actually clustering together,” Shaaban said. “What we’re arguing for is: Let's start evaluating those things together and try to understand whether the cooccurrence of certain factors is increasing dementia risk beyond what we would expect.”
In 2022, she co-authored a perspective paper in collaboration with the International Society to Advance Alzheimer's Research and Treatment (ISTAART) that took a more global approach, exploring how sex and gender differences and their associated dementia risk vary by world region. However, that paper exposed a shortage of research in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), prompting Shaaban and her co-authors to publish a follow-up in January 2026.
“We wanted to apply a more culturally informed lens in this paper, and we felt that our knowledge was really limited,” Shaaban said. “Certain approaches and beliefs and factors are just different in different cultures and countries, so we felt, once we had written that first paper, that there was more work to do.”
A framework for future research
Led by Shaaban, their latest paper introduced a Population Neuroscience-Dementia Syndemics (PNDS) Framework to examine overlooked dementia risk factors in LMICs. Exposure to war, oppression, natural disasters, displacement and other forms of conflict aren’t just global crises, but also “critical brain health issues,” Shaaban said. This coincides with an expected rise in dementia cases in these regions. Studies show that about 60% of people with dementia live in LMICs, and that number is projected to rise to 71% by 2050.
“The area of greatest growth in dementia cases over the next several decades is going to be the low and middle-income countries where people are living longer now,” Shaaban explained. “They're living to the age of risk for dementia.”
Shaaban hopes their framework will guide future research efforts and promote policy interventions to reduce dementia risk. She also plans to apply it to her own research in the U.S., explaining that this framework could be used to study marginalized populations in high-income countries, as well.
Despite the lingering questions in her field of research, Shaaban feels encouraged by the steady flow of studies now exploring the complex social factors underlying dementia.
“Researchers are doing much more work looking into area deprivation, racism, stress, education and the way these factors present in populations,” Shaaban said. “It's a really exciting time, and I think it's definitely going to lead to more breakthroughs in the future.”