Rongxiang (Catherine) Tang

LHNL Home Lifespan Health Neuroscience Laboratory

✨I am recruiting PhD students this cycle to join my lab at TAMU in Fall 2026! The lab focuses on cognitive neuroscience of aging and early risk prediction for AD. For more information about the lab, please visit: lifespanhealthneuro.weebly.com.

We're hiring! We have an open TT faculty position in lifespan neuroscience. I'm not on the committee but happy to answer questions about the department and TAMU more generally (I also co-chaired similar searches the last two years). Come join us, please share widely. apply.interfolio.com/172150

Age of menopause and dementia risk in 10,832 women from the Swedish Twin Registry INTRODUCTION An earlier age of menopause (AOM) is hypothesized to increase vulnerability to the neuropathological processes of dementia, which begin in midlife. METHODS We tested this hypothesis i.....

New paper out from the lab, demonstrating a robust non-linear relationship between age at menopause and dementia risk. Fantastic work by post-doc Dr. Ursula Saelzler. alz-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Reevaluating the role of education on cognitive decline and brain aging in longitudinal cohorts across 33 Western countries - Nature Medicine In a large cross-national study, education was linked to better memory and larger brain volumes but not to slower cognitive or brain decline with age, suggesting that the association reflects early-li...

New study out in Nature Medicine: Education does not protect against age-related decline of memory. Read more here: Reevaluating the role of education on cognitive decline and brain aging in longitudinal cohorts across 33 Western countries www.nature.com/articles/s41...

These results suggest that there is shared variance between SMC and negative affect that is observable at the neuroanatomical level. The trait-like dimension of SMC needs to be distinguished from state-related SMC in research and clinical settings.

We showed that the neuroanatomical correlates of current SMC (using cortical mean diffusivity) spatially resembled (i.e., more overlaps) those of concurrent negative affect but not those of objective memory performance.

Despite the behavioral evidence, the neuroanatomical underpinnings of the trait-like dimension of SMC remain unknown. Moreover, it is unclear whether the neuroanatomical correlates of the trait-like dimension overlap with those of negative affect.

Subjective memory concern (SMC) is regarded as a precursor to memory impairment/dementia (i.e., state-like), but it also reflects an individual’s trait-like tendency to worry about memory, which is genetically and more strongly linked to negative affect than to objective memory performance.

Happy to share a new published study link.springer.com/article/10.1...
on subjective memory concern, negative affect, and cortical microstructure using @vetsa.bsky.social dataset and supported by a K01 grant from the NIA!

A collection of modules, datasets, and other resources for learning to program in R, geared toward students in psychology and neuroscience: ritcheym.github.io/ppn/

Are you doing EMA research and wonder how to go about it? In recent work we've adressed some open questions and challenges, here is a brief summary of papers and materials.

🧵 #PsychSciSky 🧪 #StatsSky

Advancing the science of women’s health

THRILLED to see this SI now out addressing the power and potential of focusing our lens on women. H/t to Tali for making space for these ideas to flourish and for a dream team of investigators to contribute!!

Advancing the science of women’s health | Science Advances www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Head Motion in Diffusion Magnetic Resonance Imaging: Quantification, Mitigation, and Structural Associations in Large, Cross‐Sectional Datasets Across the Lifespan We characterized motion during diffusion MRI scans across 16,995 image sessions and find that (1) modern preprocessing pipelines effectively mitigate motion to the point where biases are not detectab....

It's hard to overstate what a big deal this paper is: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/.... Head motion in dMRI is NOT like head motion in BOLD.

Check out our review highlighting the importance of monoamines towards understanding Alzheimer's disease. We describe promising neuroimaging and daily life sampling approaches to better elucidate the neurobiological mechanisms underlying AD.

Lifetime risk and projected burden of dementia - Nature Medicine A cohort study of over 15,000 US adults found that the lifetime risk of developing dementia from ages 55 to 95 is 42%, with the highest risk in APOE ε4 carriers, women and Black adults, and projected ...

Lifetime risk of dementia after age 55 years estimated to be 42%, based on a community-based, prospective cohort study of 15,043.

Policies that enhance healthy aging urgently needed
🧪
@natureportfolio.bsky.social

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Glad to share the paper on this new platform😀. A continuation of my work on examining socioeconomic disadvantages across the lifespan on later-life brain and cognition!

Learning how BlueSky works!😀