Shelby Bachman knew early on she wanted to study the brain, aging and memory. Her interest arose from having a grandfather with Alzheimer’s disease and an early introduction to neuroanatomy while still in high school.
Bachman’s undergraduate and graduate education focused deeply on these topics, and she now works for a biotech company called VivoSense. In her role, she uses wearable sensor data to develop digital measures of clinical changes that occur due to disease.
As a neuroscience major at USC, Bachman discovered the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology in her junior year. She worked as a research assistant in the lab of Mara Mather, professor of gerontology, psychology and biomedical engineering.
“Working in Dr. Mather’s lab was an invaluable experience,” Bachman says. “The projects I assisted with involved running behavioral experiments with younger and older adults. I learned how to analyze data and put together a story to answer a research question.”
After graduating, Bachman realized that her real passion was research, so she enrolled in a master’s program at the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany. Coincidentally, Mather had just finished a sabbatical at Berlin’s prestigious Max Planck Institute for Human Development.
Bachman ended up collaborating with Mather at the Max Planck Institute. Their work focused on a brain region called the locus coeruleus that lies deep in the subcortex. Scientists think the locus coeruleus is important for cognitive function in aging and Alzheimer’s disease. This project led Bachman back to the USC Leonard Davis School to pursue a PhD in Mather’s lab.
In completing the diverse coursework available through the PhD program, Bachman gained a multidisciplinary perspective of aging and strong data-science skills. Her dissertation work involved a range of research projects. For one project, she conducted a behavioral experiment to measure how cognitive performance changed after briefly squeezing a therapy ball. The study’s results showed that a short period of isometric exercise improved working memory performance in both older and younger participants.
She also participated in a labwide study examining the effects of slow-paced breathing on the sympathetic nervous system in younger and older adults. Slow-paced breathing increases heart rate variability, which is important for emotional well-being and stress management. For this study, Bachman collected and analyzed large amounts of brain-imaging data and prepared several publications.
“My PhD research was a full-spectrum experience,” says Bachman. “I learned how to manage a project, including recruiting participants and overseeing a team of research assistants. I gained experience in collecting and analyzing large sets of physiological and brain-imaging data. I also gained experience publishing my results and presenting to very different audiences.”
Bachman completed her PhD in May 2022 and started working at VivoSense as a research scientist shortly after. VivoSense develops digital measures from wearable sensor data for use in clinical trials.
Bachman’s work builds upon her PhD research measuring physiological signals. “My work centers around the development of digital clinical measures for people with Alzheimer’s and cancer,” she says. “We are excited about the possibility of using a wearable accelerometer
to capture functional changes. An accelerometer measures aspects of gait and mobility such as steps, walking speed and stride length.”
Wearables generate large data sets. The data-science skills Bachman developed at USC are helping her analyze and interpret this data. She’s also thinking about her work from policy, insurance and population-level perspectives. Bachman credits the multidisciplinary training she received at the USC Leonard Davis School for this broad view.
Looking to the future, Bachman sees the potential of wearables and other types of sensors to help solve some of the challenges of aging. “I’m excited to be contributing my background to this work and seeing where the digital health field goes,” she says.
