Maxwell Elliott, Ph.D.

Max Elliott is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Minnesota. He earned a B.S. in psychology from the University of Minnesota in 2014. He then spent two years working as a research assistant in the intramural research program at the National Institute of Mental Health and received a Ph.D. from Duke University. During his graduate work, Elliott worked with Ahmad Hariri, Terrie Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi to characterize signs of accelerated midlife brain aging that could be indicative of early risk for age-related disease and cognitive aging. He then completed a postdoctoral fellowship with Randy Buckner at Harvard University, where he developed “cluster scanning,” a new tool for rapidly characterizing the longitudinal rate of brain change in healthy aging and neurodegenerative disease.

The Elliott lab brings together these approaches and others from geroscience, neuropsychology and brain imaging to study how individual differences in brain aging emerge, what risk and resiliency factors across the lifespan create them, and what interventions and preventative measures could allow more individuals to maintain cognitive ability throughout their lifespan.

Projects:

• Promoting functional brain maintenance – Insights from successful agers