PROFILE

Ganga Bey, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her research draws on geroscience and social psychological perspectives to explore the social and epigenetic mechanisms that influence disparate aging rates over the life course across social groups. The ultimate goal of her work is to identify and facilitate implementation of novel strategies for intervening on the profound and preventable health consequences of social stressors. Dr. Bey is the recipient of a National Institute on Aging K99/R00 award to examine whether a novel, modifiable identity characteristic she proposes as foundational to compassionate orientation predicts psychosocial risk and resilience factors that may modify the impact of social disadvantage on aging and cardiovascular and cognitive health. Currently, Dr. Bey’s lab, the Healthy Aging with Resilient Identities (HARI) lab, focuses on identifying factors driving heterogeneity in aging pathways to Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias (ADRD), with specific interest in how identity-related characteristics influence cardiovascular and neuropsychiatric risk factors for ADRD over the life course across social groups.