Member since
2005
Her passion
Since the late 1990s, Quiroz has been studying a rural clan in Colombia's mountainous Antioquia region, where nearly half the 5,000 members develop early-onset Alzheimer's disease around age 45. A native of Medellín, Colombia, she started working with these families in college. Today, she is continuing that work as a junior faculty member at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School. Quiroz also co-directs the Multicultural Neuropsychology Program at Massachusetts General, a service that offers culturally appropriate bilingual neuropsychological testing and interventions to Latino children and adults.
Challenging work
Quiroz travels to Colombia twice a year to study the families, using brain imaging technology to monitor any brain changes that appear before the disease starts to present clinically. She has found, for example, that brain function and anatomy in people with a particular gene mutation starts to deteriorate decades before they begin to show symptoms. The work has been both exhilarating and heartbreaking, she says. "We get to know them when they are doing fine, and then you see them through to the point where they don't recognize you anymore," she says. The families struggle economically since those who are afflicted have to stop working, and those who don't develop the disease are often caregiving for multiple family members at once, she says.
What keeps her going
Last year, she won a National Institutes of Health Director's Early Independence Award for her research, which enabled her to start her own lab and hire support in Boston. In September, Quiroz completed another round of data collection in Colombia, and she expects to see some members of the families in Boston within the next few months for more advanced imaging examinations. What makes the research rewarding is the families' grateful and generous spirit. "We are giving them some hope," she says.
An 'everlasting spring'
Traveling to Colombia means spending time with her father, two sisters and extended family in Medellín. Quiroz brings her 4-year-old son so that he can play with his cousins while she works. "He loves the farm animals and spending lots of time outside in the mountains," she says. And she loves the year-round mild tropical weather. "The nickname for Medellín is 'City of the Everlasting Spring.'"
— Jamie Chamberlin
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