Marcia Jimenez MS, PhD

Dr. Marcia I. Pescador Jimenez, MS, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor at the Boston University School of Public Health. Marcia received her Ph.D. in epidemiology from the Brown University School of Public Health and completed an NHLBI T32 postdoctoral fellowship in cardiovascular disease and environmental epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She is formally trained as a cardiovascular, environmental, and aging epidemiologist with a multidisciplinary research portfolio in the epidemiology of aging, specifically geographic contextual risk factors and racial/ethnic disparities.

Her early work evaluated the relationship between greenspace and hypertension among adults. More recently, she has extended this to examine the relationship between greenspace and cognitive development among children and mediation analysis between greenspace and cognitive function. Her current work focuses on novel metrics of green space and the urban environment using Deep Learning Algorithms and Google Street View images. She has extensive experience working with several cohort studies, including, the New England Family Study, Project Viva, the Nurses Health Studies, and the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis. She is currently funded through a K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award from the National Institute on Aging which aims to quantify the role of built and natural environments on cognitive functioning and Alzheimer's disease risk, evaluating racial/ethnic disparities.