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Alexa S. Beiser, PhD

Professor, Biostatistics - Boston University School of Public Health

617-358-2515
alexab@bu.edu
Crosstown Center - 3rd Floor
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Biography

Alexa Beiser has been on the faculty at Boston University School of Public Health since 1985, engaged in teaching and collaborative public health research; she co-developed the doctoral program in biostatistics; co-directed the biostatistics program from 2000-2004, and served as Associate Chair for Education from 2015-2018. She formerly taught and coordinated the sections of Introduction to Statistical Computing. For more than twenty-five years, Dr. Beiser has served as the lead biostatistician for the Framingham Heart Study (FHS) neurology group, examining risk factors and prevalence and incidence of clinical and sub-clinical neurological outcomes including MRI and PET measures of brain structure, cognitive performance, dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, stroke, Parkinson’s disease, and epilepsy. Dr. Beiser currently leads the FHS neurology group data management team, responsible for surveillance and tracking of incident dementia, for supervision of recruitment of participants for various grant-funded studies, and for management of data collected at FHS as well as those measured or processed at other institutions (e.g., brain MRI or PET scans); and the FHS neurology group biostatistics team of six biostatisticians. Decades of examining risk factors for neurological diseases has naturally led to studying factors associated with accelerated brain aging. Dr. Beiser has coauthored FHS publications relating risk factors including midlife vascular factors, plasma homocysteine, plasma leptin levels, cardiac index, red blood cell omega-3 fatty acids, metabolic dysregulation, visceral fat, air pollution; serum brain-derived neurotrophic factor; and insulin-like growth factor 1, to measures of brain aging. Dr. Beiser also has made use of the richness of the multigenerational Framingham data to relate documented parental dementia and stroke to offspring stroke, cognitive performance, and MRI measures of brain structure. In investigations of clinical neurological endpoints, she has applied competing risk analyses and has also been able to investigate temporal trends in prevalent and incident neurological disease due to the availability of event surveillance over many decades. In all these studies, Dr. Beiser plays a key role in project conceptualization, is responsible for supervision of statistical data management, analysis, and interpretation of results, and contributes to manuscript preparation and critical review.

Other Positions

  • Professor, Neurology - Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine
  • Investigator - Framingham Heart Study

Education

  • Boston University, PhD Field of Study: Mathematics
  • University of California, San Diego, MA Field of Study: Applied Mathematics
  • University of California, Santa Cruz, BA Field of Study: Biology/Psychology

Websites

Publications

  • Published on 10/7/2026

    Lioutas VA, Aparicio HJ, Romero JR, Himali D, Ghosh S, Ramachandran V, Beiser A, Seshadri S, Himali J. Transient Ischemic Attack as a Marker of Coronary Heart Disease: A Population-Based Study. Neuroepidemiology. 2026 Oct 07; 1. PMID: 42842534.

     Read At: PubMed
  • Published on 9/24/2026

    Cooper LL, Banerjee A, Beiser AS, Charisis S, Hamel-Sellman DJ, Korzinski TJ, Benjamin EJ, Hamburg NM, Vasan RS, Seshadri S, Mitchell GF. Associations of Brain Structure and Neuropsychological Function With Artificial Intelligence Estimates of Biological Vascular Age. Arterioscler Thromb Vasc Biol. 2026 Nov; 46(11):e325247. PMID: 42779540.

     Read At: PubMed
  • Published on 9/7/2026

    Manchanda R, Pinheiro A, Aparicio HJ, Lioutas VA, Beiser AS, Sisto J, Ekenze O, Benjamin EJ, DeCarli C, Seshadri S, Romero JR. Cerebral Small Vessel Disease and Risk of Cardiovascular Events and All-Cause Mortality: The Framingham Heart Study. medRxiv. 2026 Sep 07. PMID: 42818802.

     Read At: PubMed
  • Published on 8/30/2026

    Mulligan MD, Wang R, Yang Q, Beiser AS, Maillard P, Satizabal C, Ghosh S, Tanner J, Johnson KA, DeCarli C, Tracy RP, Levy D, Benjamin EJ, El Fakhri G, Vasan RS, Seshadri S, McGrath ER. Mid-life candidate vascular plasma biomarkers are associated with MRI markers of vascular brain injury and amyloid- and tau-PET in cognitively healthy adults. J Alzheimers Dis. 2026 Oct; 113(4):1674-1699. PMID: 42669799.

     Read At: PubMed
  • Published on 8/19/2026

    Yiannakou I, Jacques PF, Long MT, Beiser A, Pickering RT, Moore LL. Development and validation of a modified Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (mDASH) index in the community-based Framingham Heart Study Second Generation cohort. Clin Nutr. 2026 Nov; 66:106766. PMID: 42753339.

     Read At: PubMed
  • Published on 7/29/2026

    Yiallourou S, Wiedner C, Yang Q, Baril AA, Misialek JR, Kline CE, Harrison S, Bernal R, Bisson A, Himali D, Chiu T, Cavuoto MG, Ancoli-Israel S, Xiao Q, Vaou EO, Weihs A, Leng Y, Gottesman RF, Beiser AS, Lopez OL, Lutsey PL, Purcell S, Redline S, Seshadri S, Stone KL, Yaffe K, Pase MP, Himali JJ. Association of Sleep Variables With Cognitive Performance and the Risk of Dementia in the Sleep and Dementia Consortium. Neurology. 2026 Aug 25; 107(4):e218182. PMID: 42525904.

     Read At: PubMed
  • Published on 7/24/2026

    Lioutas VA, Fletcher E, Hyacinth HI, DeCarli C, Aparicio HJ, Romero JR, Seshadri S, Beiser A. Stroke-Related Acceleration of Brain Atrophy beyond Aging in the Framingham Study: Paired Pre- and Post-MRI Evidence and Cognitive Associations. Cerebrovasc Dis. 2026 Jul 24; 1-10. PMID: 42497104.

     Read At: PubMed
  • Published on 6/1/2026

    Palatsides EL, Yiallourou S, Himali D, Cavuoto MG, Baril AA, Yang Q, Peloso GM, Ryan J, El Fakhri G, Ghosh S, Thibault E, DeCarli CS, Johnson KA, Beiser AS, Seshadri S, Himali JJ, Pase MP. Influence of an AQP4 haplotype and sleep duration on early Alzheimer's disease. Alzheimers Dement. 2026 Jun; 22(6):e71540. PMID: 42222915.

     Read At: PubMed
  • Published on 6/1/2026

    Tang A, Collazo Martinez AD, Kim M, Shahidzadeh A, Ting SJ, Vaidya B, Jiang X, Le HV, Wang R, Beiser A, Sobrin L, Seshadri S, Kashani AH. Effect of Optical Coherence Tomography Angiography Image Artifacts on Quantitation of Vessel Density and Perfusion. Ophthalmic Surg Lasers Imaging Retina. 2026 Jun; 57(6):383-392. PMID: 42274715.

     Read At: PubMed
  • Published on 5/1/2026

    Young VM, Wiedner C, Baril AA, Pase MP, Ruiz A, Salardini A, Frei CR, Kautz T, Bernal R, Yiallourou S, Cribb L, Beiser A, Teixeira AL, Himali JJ, Seshadri S. Non-linear associations between sleep duration and plasma p-tau181 in the Framingham Heart Study. Alzheimers Dement. 2026 May; 22(5):e71499. PMID: 42156936.

     Read At: PubMed

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