Professor Deborah Blacker

Deborah Blacker, MD, ScD is Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Deputy Chair and Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She is a geriatric psychiatrist and epidemiologist based at Massachusetts General Hospital, where she directs the Gerontology Research Unit and serves as Associate Chief for Research in the Department of Psychiatry. She leads the Research Education Component and co-leads the Clinical Core for the Mass Alzheimer's Disease Research Center and is involved in multiple local and national studies of Alzheimer’s disease genetics, epidemiology, phenomenology, and health services, primarily focused on assessment methods, including a recent focus on measuring dementia in electronic health records and claims. In the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, she co-leads a program in Psychiatric Genetics and Translational Research and teaches a course on Assessment Methods for Psychiatric Research. She has served on multiple expert committees including the DSM-5 Neurocognitive Disorders Workgroup and the Decadal Review Committee for Social Science Research in Alzheimer’s Disease of the United States National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.