Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior

Alina Lesnovskaya graduated with a B.S. in biopsychology, cognition, and neuroscience with honors from the University of Michigan in 2015. Following graduation, she spent two years as a study coordinator at the Michigan Alzheimer’s Disease Center. She began her doctoral training in the Joint Clinical and Biological Health Psychology PhD program at the University of Pittsburgh under the mentorship of Dr. Kirk Erickson. Her research focuses on early detection of risk for aging-related cognitive decline and identification of accessible intervention targets. During her graduate training, she completed a NIA T32 pre-doctoral fellowship in Population Neuroscience of Aging-Related Dementias and received a certificate in Cognitive Neuroscience from the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, a joint program of the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University. Her dissertation examined the relationship between regional white matter hyperintensities (WMHs) and cognition in older adults. During her clinical psychology pre-doctoral internship at The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, she worked with Dr. Athene Lee to extend this line of research by examining lifestyle moderators of the relationship between WMHs and cognition in older adults at risk for cognitive decline. She is grateful for the exceptional training she has received from her clinical mentors at Brown, Drs. Jennifer Davis, Seth Margolis, Nicole McLaughlin, Athene Lee, and Stephanie Czech. Following her pre-doctoral internship, Alina is excited to join VA Boston as a Neuropsychology Postdoctoral Fellow. She thanks her mentors, family, friends, cohort, and her partner, Ian, for their endless support.