Michelle S. Keller, PhD, MPH, Principal Investigator
Dr. Keller studies how health systems can stop giving older adults medications and care that no longer help them — and start delivering the care that does. Her work spans deprescribing high-risk medications like benzodiazepines and opioids, access to new Alzheimer’s therapies, and the decision-support tools clinicians actually use. She holds the Leonard and Sophie Davis Early Career Endowed Chair in Minority Aging at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, and is a Visiting Faculty Scientist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.
Before research, she was a staff writer at the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune — which is where she learned to ask the question underneath the question, and why nothing from this lab gets published in language a patient couldn’t follow.
PhD and MPH in Health Policy and Management, UCLA. BA in Human Biology, Stanford.
Keller CARE Lab Team
Grecia B. Vargas Meléndez, PhD, MSPH Postdoctoral Fellow
Grecia studies what stands between Latino older adults and the care that could help them, working on both of the lab's access projects: the cost and non-cost barriers to new Alzheimer's therapies among Hispanic and Latino older adults, and equitable access to neurology care for people living with dementia.
She comes to this from a decade of work on inequity in kidney care. Her doctoral research at Johns Hopkins traced how place-based factors and structural racism shape kidney transplantation outcomes for US Latinos, and she has worked on living donor outcomes, the kidney donation decision, and prostate cancer care for Medicaid patients under the ACA. She works in both Spanish and English across qualitative and quantitative methods, and much of her career has involved making health information usable by the people who need it — including a health literacy intervention for hypertension among Latino adults and a community health worker training manual for a Latino adolescent mental health study.
PhD in Health Policy and Management (2025) and MSPH in Health Education and Communication, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. BA in Spanish and Portuguese, UCLA. She has run four marathons.
Google Scholar · ORCID 0000-0002-2953-8192
Dinithi Perera, LLM Doctoral Student
Dinithi studies how the new monoclonal antibody treatments for Alzheimer's disease get valued — by the patients weighing them, the physicians offering them, and the systems deciding what to cover. Her broader interest is in who takes part in dementia research and what the gaps in that participation mean for the treatments and policies that follow from it.
She spent a decade running dementia prevention trials before starting her doctorate: most recently at the FINGERS Brain Health Institute, coordinating the World-Wide FINGERS global network, and at Imperial College London's Ageing Epidemiology Research Unit, where she managed the MET-FINGER trial and ran the CHARIOT research volunteer registry. She is a co-author on the MET-FINGER and CHARIOT protocols.
She holds law degrees from the University of Kent, Queen Mary University of London, and the College of William and Mary, and led the flag protocol team for victory ceremonies at the London 2012 Paralympic Games.
Junxian Liu, MS Data Analyst
Junxian builds and analyzes the datasets behind the lab's work — merging and cleaning claims, EHR, and survey data, and running the models that turn them into findings. He holds an MS in Biostatistics from the University of Michigan, where he worked on multi-omics data for the Molecular Transducers of Physical Activity Consortium, and a BA in Mathematics and Statistics from the University of Connecticut. He works primarily in R, Python, SAS, and SQL, with a background in survival analysis, longitudinal models, and building dashboards that make data usable by people who don't write code.
Sophia Soriano, BS Research Assistant
Sophia works on two of the lab's Alzheimer's projects: how patients and physicians weigh the value of the new monoclonal antibody treatments, and what cost and non-cost barriers keep those treatments out of reach for Hispanic and Latino older adults.
She graduated summa cum laude from UCLA in Human Biology and Society with minors in Global Health and Disability Studies, and came to research through direct care — accompanying unhoused patients to their appointments as a companion and caseworker with UCLA's Mobile Clinic Project, and supporting older adults living with memory loss at an adult day program.
Aani Nagaiah Undergraduate Research Assistant
Aani works on the lab's study of cost and non-cost barriers to new Alzheimer's therapies among Hispanic and Latino older adults.
She's an undergraduate in Health and Aging at USC with a minor in News Media and Society, a certified medical assistant, and the founder of a nonprofit that brings art and music to people living in memory care.
Amy Yang Undergraduate Research Assistant
Amy works on two projects about medications in the hospital: equipping nurses to start deprescribing conversations about benzodiazepines and sleep medications, and improving how medication changes are communicated to patients when they leave the hospital.
She’s an undergraduate in Pharmacology and Drug Development at USC’s Mann School of Pharmacy, and volunteers as a clinical scholar at MLK Community Hospital, where she works directly with patients. She speaks conversational Vietnamese and Spanish. Amy entered USC with a strong interest in drug development and a desire to understand how medications affect the human body and help combat disease. Over time, her interests have become increasingly focused on neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease and the development of treatments for illnesses that currently have no cure. Amy is also passionate about patient care and working one-on-one with adults and elders facing serious illnesses. She hopes to contribute to research that advances the prevention and treatment of age-related diseases.
Alumni
Chloe Leder — Research Assistant, 2023–2026. Now a medical student at Rush Medical College. Chloe worked on the iAGREE patient consent studies and is a co-author on two papers from that work.
Meera Bhagat — Research Assistant, 2022–2023. Now a medical student at the University of Michigan Medical School. Meera co-authored the lab's scoping review of medication management interventions for patients facing language and health literacy barriers.
Johan Carrascoza-Bolaños — Research Assistant, 2020–2022. Now a medical student at the UC San Diego School of Medicine. Johan co-authored the lab's studies on interpreter use in inpatient medication management and on barriers to deprescribing benzodiazepines in the hospital.
Natasha Joglekar — Research Assistant, 2020. Now a medical student at the Temple University Lewis Katz School of Medicine. Natasha was first author on the lab's study of clinical decision support alerts for reducing benzodiazepine and sedative-hypnotic prescribing in older adults, published in Applied Clinical Informatics.
Seda Shirinian, MS — Research Assistant, 2019–2020. Now a Senior Analyst at Innopiphany, working in health policy, market access, and health economics and outcomes research. Seda analyzed stroke recovery and readmission patterns and naloxone prescribing in the lab, then completed an MS in Epidemiology at UCLA.