Research in the Beam lab generally focuses on development across the life-span that include a range of variables, including cognitive ability, personality, loneliness, depressive symptomatology. We have a special interest in life-span risk factors of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementia. We typically use data from longitudinal twin studies to study how genetic and environmental variances correlates and interacts across development to explain differences in people’s developmental trajectories, but we also use data from population-representative samples like the Health and Retirement Study and the Mexican Health and Aging Study. Most recently, our lab has taken a special interest in using DNA methylation data to study how people’s milieus may affect genetic expression of psychological and cognitive outcomes. Please read about the diverse array of research projects undertaken by members of our lab here.

Louisville Twin Study

Started in 1958 by Frank Falkner, the Louisville Twin Study is the longest running twin study in the United States. Twins and their parents were continuously enrolled at twins’ birth into the LTS until 2000. Physical, mental, motor, cognitive, attachment, and temperament data were collected from the twins from 3 months of age until 15 years of age. The midlife phase of the LTS started in 2020, in which we collected neuropsychological, psychosocial, clinical biomarker, genetic, and epigenetic data from the twins to test early and midlife risk factors of preclinical symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. The Louisville Twin Study constitutes the lab’s only data collection effort at this time, which is conducted out of the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Louisville  (R01AG063949).

Health and Retirement Study (HRS)

Learn more about the HRS here.

Integrative Analysis of Longitudinal Studies on Aging (IALSA)

Learn more about IALSA here.

Interplay of Genes and Environments Across Multiple Studies (IGEMS)

Learn more about IGEMS here.

Mauritius Joint Child Health Project

Learn more about the Mauritius Project here.

Mexican Health and Aging Study (MHAS)

Learn more about MHAS here.

Michigan State University Twin Registry (MSUTR)

We often work with collaborators at the MSUTR to work on methodological problems related to phenotype-environment effects and gene-environment interaction between latent ACE variables (Molenaar et al., 2014) in longitudinal twin data. Learn more about the MSUTR here.

TwinLife

Learn more about TwinLife here.

Washington State Twin Registry (WSTR)

Learn more about the WSTR here.