Margo Heston, PhD

Dr. Margo Heston is a postdoctoral scholar and an NIH F99/K00 fellow funded through the NIH Blueprint and BRAIN Initiative Diversity Specialized Predoctoral to Postdoctoral Advancement in Neuroscience (D-SPAN) program.

Heston focuses her research on the social exposome as a contributor to the timing of biomarker and dementia onset in Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD). Her overarching goal is to mitigate disparities in ADRD by identifying mechanisms that link life-course experiences with biomolecular events in pathologic brain aging. In her work she combines clinical, imaging, and fluid biomarker data with place-based measures of the built environment.

Prior to joining the UCSF Memory and Aging Center, Heston completed her PhD degree at the University of Wisconsin (UW)-Madison where she investigated how preclinical trajectories of AD biomarkers are affected by changes in gut microbiome composition, inflammatory environment, and gut/host metabolism, as well as the contributing effect of neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage. As a postdoctoral fellow at UW-Madison, she gained expertise in temporal biomarker modeling approaches to study biological and multilevel social determinants of health that impact the timing of positron emission tomography (PET) biomarker onset and the time to subsequent dementia.