Maritza Dowling, PhD, MS

Current HIV/AIDS Research Activities:

• I have provided consulting services to faculty working with HIV adult populations. For almost a decade, I worked as the co-director of the Biostatistics and Data Management Unit at the Wisconsin Alzheimer's Disease Research Center (ADRC) and as an Associate Scientist in the department of Biostatistics.
• The statistical consultation experience I have in the topic of HIV has been on HIV-associated neurocognitive disorder and the effect of inflammation-associated cerebrospinal fluid biomarkers (e.g., NFL and MCP) on neuronal integrity and brain inflammation. I have proposed advanced structural equation methodologies to address the main research questions.
• I am a methodologist with a decade of experience in the context of aging and Alzheimer's disease. I was trained as a statistician. I also have a strong background in psychometrics, item response theory, and latent variable modeling.

Current HIV/AIDS Educational Activities:

• Most generally, I am very interested in applying statistical modeling to study the association between HIV and the neural substrates of cognitive processes signaling pathological cognitive decline of the Alzheimer's type. Because of this, in the last 8 months I have been immersed in the HIV research literature learning more about areas that need further investigation and how these areas converge with the experience I bring in aging research and cognitive decline. My search has included topics investigating the association between genetic, neuroimaging, cognitive, and CSF biomarkers and HIV in older adults.