Education

• PhD, Neurobiology, UCLA
• BS, Anthropology, UCLA
• BS, Physiological Sciences, UCLA

Research

• Alzheimer’s disease
• Menopause
• Sex differences
• Metabolic syndrome

Overview

Amy Christensen, PhD, has extensive experience in endocrinology and the aging brain. Her recent work explored how aging and the loss of hormones in females at menopause affect Alzheimer’s disease risk, and how and when hormone therapy might be most effective. She is especially interested in compounding risk factors. No single factor is going to be the reason a person gets a disease, and we are all affected by the entirety of our environment. She believes that looking at the interactions between environmental risk factors like diet and physiological factors like sex and hormone loss with genetic factors will give us a more complete view of how these risk factors affect disease incidence and progression. Further, it may be necessary to tailor treatment for diseases like Alzheimer’s to the genetics as well as environmental risk factors of the patient.