Wendy Qiu, MD, PhD

Wendy Qiu, M.D., Ph.D., is Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Experimental Pharmacology & Therapeutics; the Biomarker Core Co-director of the Boston University Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (BU ADRC); and the Principle Investigator of the Laboratory of Molecular Psychiatry in Aging at Boston University School of Medicine. She is a Board Certified Psychiatrist who was trained at Tufts Medical Center and at the Payne Whitney Clinic, New York Presbyterian Hospital, Cornell Medical Center. As a practicing psychiatrist, she cares for patients with dementia and other psychiatric illnesses, including late life depression and anxiety, and sees patients at BU ADRC for clinical trials. Many of her patients seek care at Boston Medical Center because they are frustrated with their deteriorating cognitive function and their behavior or mood symptoms are causing tremendous burdens for their caregivers. Motivated by her desire to help patients with devastating diseases in geriatric psychiatry, especially dementia which frequently lacks diagnostic tools and effective therapies, Dr. Qiu devotes her career to researching the fundamental causational mechanisms of these diseases and translating her research findings to seeking biomarkers for diagnoses and therapeutics for Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative diseases. Her research team has pioneered discoveries of and published several papers on the effects of blood metabolic and inflammatory factors, including blood amylin and C-reactive protein, on Alzheimer’s disease pathology in the brain through the blood brain barrier (BBB). She is the principle investigator or co-investigator of multiple grants from the National Institute of Health, Alzheimer’s Disease Association, and other private foundations.