Crystal M. Glover, PhD, Advances Optimal Aging Outcomes

Crystal M. Glover, PhD, wants you to live a long, healthy life. To that end, the world-renowned applied social psychologist and mixed methodologist is working to remove obstacles to healthy aging for everyone.

How do we make decisions about our health? Crystal M. Glover, PhD, has been asking this question since middle school.

“Before school, I’d go with my father to the hospital where he worked and I’d wander around,” says Glover, an associate professor of neurology in the UC Irvine School of Medicine. “I became curious as to how individuals arrived at the hospital, why some people were alone and others weren’t, and why some appeared relieved while others were distraught. It just made me think about decision-making around health outcomes.”

Today, that curious young teen is a world-renowned applied social psychologist and mixed methodologist with expertise in decision-making and protective and risk factors in older age. She’s also celebrating her first year at the UC Irvine Institute for Memory Impairments and Neurological Disorders (UCI MIND), where she serves as the Outreach, Recruitment, and Engagement Core Leader for its Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (ADRC).

“What led me to UC Irvine in January 2025 was the promise of collaboration,” says Glover, “and in my first year, that promise has borne such incredible fruit as we work to remove obstacles to optimal health outcomes in aging for everyone.”

A More Holistic View

Glover’s early-morning musings at the hospital prompted her dad to connect her with various mentors who introduced her to concepts of psychology. That later became her major, with a minor in philosophy. “I was thinking about all these nebulous things, but I wanted my studies to be tangible,” says Glover.

That’s when she discovered she had a knack for statistics. “Some professors took me under their wing and gave me the language I needed to understand my interest in the brain not only as an entity but also as a functioning cognitive tool,” she says. This led Glover to study social rather than clinical psychology in graduate school at Howard University, exploring brain-behavior interactions and how various constraints and opportunities influence our decisions. Yet she still felt biostatistics wasn’t telling the full story of lived experiences. “This was more like the skeleton of a person,” she explains.

So, she studied qualitative methodologies and mixed-method approaches during her postdoctoral fellowship at Dartmouth, finding ways to “integrate quantitative and qualitative approaches to have a more holistic story of people’s decision-making and health experiences throughout their lives,” she explains.

Structural & Social Determinants of Health

In looking at how brain health interfaced with structural and social determinants of health (SSDOH), Glover saw an opportunity to have an impact. Social factors that influence health and related decisions — such as socioeconomic status, housing and neighborhood characteristics, and social support networks — are greatly influenced by structural variables, including macroeconomic, social, and public policies and health investments governed by cultural values. “Health disparities are these largely preventable differences that block our ability to have the best aging experiences possible,” she says. “My job as a researcher is to provide high-fidelity evidence into how structural and social factors impact aging and our decision-making.”

Yet evidence-based policy changes take time, so community engagement is also critical. To offer more immediate evidence-informed solutions and insights to communities, especially those at risk for suboptimal outcomes in aging, Glover shares resources stemming from scientific advances. She provides educational materials and gives talks in community-based settings to empower individuals to better navigate factors out of their control and to make choices that align with their health goals.

“I want people to have an eye toward risk reduction that is lifestyle-focused,” she says. “For example, what you do for your heart is good for your brain, so getting and staying active is important — mentally, physically, and socially. Stay curious and in community.” (Learn more about brain health online.)

Glover further emphasizes brain health and SSDOH as the inaugural editor-in-chief of Alzheimer’s and Dementia: Behavior & Socioeconomics of Aging, a journal focused on how social considerations, economic issues and behavioral factors at the individual and interpersonal levels impact aging trajectories across the globe. “It also explores,” says Glover, “how to translate what we learn into interventional strategies, educational materials, study design protocols, clinical best practices and policy suggestions.”

Advancing Research & Building Community

Some of these same topics are mirrored in Glover’s accomplishments during her first year at UC Irvine. “I am so excited to be a part of the principal investigator teams for two NIH-funded R01 grants,” she says.

One is a five-year $18 million grant that will support one of the nation’s first clinical trial-ready cohorts for limbic-predominant age-related TDP-43 encephalopathy (LATE). It is a collaboration with S. Ahmad Sajjadi, MD; Joshua Grill, PhD; and Ali Ezzati, MD. “LATE is a type of dementia that can mimic Alzheimer’s disease and has significant implications for aging trajectories,” explains Glover. “We’re at the earlier stages of understanding LATE, so we have an opportunity to build inclusion and rigor into trial-ready cohorts from the onset.” The goal, as discussed in a recent article by Glover and Sajjadi, is to recruit, sustain and characterize a diverse cohort of people who are 80+ years of age, a population at increased risk for LATE. With this cohort, the investigator team aims to validate and refine LATE clinical criteria, develop novel biomarkers, and identify effective strategies for research participation.

The second grant, similarly related to clinical trial readiness, is a collaboration with Jason D. Flatt, PhD, of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “This work uses a community-engaged, mixed-methods research approach to facilitate participation in Alzheimer’s clinical trials among members of sexual and gender minority groups who are 50+ years of age and at increased risk of being affected by the disease, both as a person and a caregiver,” says Glover. “What these two grants have in common is a focus on dementia clinical trial readiness and a spirit of discovery and expansion.”

Furthermore, Glover shares her continued excitement in joining the long-standing NIH-funded ADRC at UC Irvine, 1 of 38 such centers across the U.S. In her UC Irvine ADRC leadership role, she has prioritized raising awareness and sharing scientific progress on aging and dementia across Orange County. Notably, the UC Irvine ADRC falls under UCI MIND, which recently received $80 million in donations to build a state-of-the-art research and care facility to enhance its position as a global leader in Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD) research and patient care.

Glover also serves as a board member for the Orange County Chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association and works with the Alzheimer’s Clinical Trials Consortium and the IMPACT Collaboratory, ensuring her research and related efforts are instructive and impactful for affected individuals and their caregivers.

Hope for the Future

“I hope that 2026 will be a year of even more scientific success and progress,” says Glover. She envisions further advancing brain health discoveries by establishing her own NIH-funded multicenter effort on study design and best practices for inclusive dementia research.

“What gives me hope for the future is that, in the field of dementia, it’s a time of great advancement and innovation,” she says, “as we work in lockstep with healthcare providers, caregivers and other supporters, and policymakers.”

Outside of work, even some of Glover’s pastimes seem aligned with her field of study. “My favorite hobby is reading — mostly historical nonfiction, because it helps to inform my work — and I’m a huge fan of yoga and meditation practices, which help keep me centered and calm,” she says. “My sole purpose, whether personally or professionally, is to facilitate optimal outcomes for everyone as we age.”

Learn more about UCI MIND and the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (ADRC).