Alumna Molly Fox will speak on the impact of women's reproductive histories on dementia at a Cambridge in America event in November.
A Gates Cambridge Alumna will speak on the impact of women’s reproductive histories on their risk of Alzheimer’s at the annual Cambridge in America Day event in November.
Molly Fox [2008] will speak about Darwinian Medicine and Alzheimer’s Disease at the Women in Science event in Silicon Valley on November 9th.
Other speakers include Professor Sharon Peacock, Chair of the Cambridge Infectious Diseases Initiative and Professor of Clinical Microbiology, and Professor Priya Natarajan, Professor in the Departments of Astronomy and Physics and Chair of the Women’s Faculty Forum at Yale University.
Cambridge in America Day is a University of Cambridge alumni event which celebrates the idea that ‘the intellectual life of Cambridge speaks to alumni with power and insight, long after they have left University behind’.
Molly Fox, who did a PhD in Biological Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and whose recently published research links breastfeeding to a lower Alzheimer’s risk, will speak about how women’s reproductive histories may affect later life dementia risk and how dementia rates might affect the role of elderly women in society.
She says: “While much medical research focuses on how genes and toxin exposures affect disease risk, the huge effects that life-history and developmental processes exert are often overlooked. I believe that studying women’s reproductive physiology is central to understanding the organisation of human society as well as many aspects of human health, from foetal programming to lifelong chronic disease risk to late-life geriatric disease risk, and creates a biological continuum between generations.”
