{"id":3565,"date":"2024-07-11T19:18:11","date_gmt":"2024-07-11T19:18:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/oge.mit.edu\/msrp\/?post_type=profiles&p=3565"},"modified":"2025-12-09T12:33:08","modified_gmt":"2025-12-09T17:33:08","slug":"alejandra-hernandez-moyers","status":"publish","type":"profiles","link":"https:\/\/oge.mit.edu\/msrp\/profiles\/alejandra-hernandez-moyers\/","title":{"rendered":"Alejandra Hernandez Moyers"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\"Alejandra,<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

MIT Department: <\/strong>Health, Sciences and Technology
Faculty Mentor: <\/strong>Prof. Laura Lewis
Research Supervisors:<\/strong> Sydney Bailes, Stephanie Williams
Undergraduate Institution:<\/strong> Brown University
Hometown:<\/strong> Mexico City, Mexico
Website:<\/strong> LinkedIn<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Biography<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Alejandra Hern\u00e1ndez Moyers is a rising junior studying Biomedical Engineering at Brown University. She was born and raised in Mexico City, which she recommends everyone to visit! Throughout her lifelong journey with sports \u2013 dancing ballet for thirteen years, wrestling, and now practicing acrobatics \u2013 women\u2019s health has become Ale\u2019s passion. She is particularly interested in untangling the mechanisms behind functional hypothalamic amenorrhea, a neuroendocrine disorder affecting young females. More broadly, she is fascinated by how diseases such as depression or Alzheimer\u2019s affect women differently than men. At Brown, she works at the Tripathi Laboratory, developing diagnostic tools for medical applications. She helped develop a device that electrically dissociates tissues into single cells, and is now focusing on organoids. This summer, she is at the Lewis Lab for Imaging Brain Dynamics, studying changes in neural dynamics with age and sex differences using fMRI and EEG data<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Abstract<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Sex Differences in Age-Related Cerebrospinal Fluid Flow and Brain
Structural Changes<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alejandra Hern\u00e1ndez Moyers1<\/sup>, Stephanie Williams2<\/sup>,3<\/sup>, Laura D. Lewis3<\/sup>,4<\/sup><\/strong>
1<\/sup>School of Engineering, Brown University
2<\/sup>Department of Neuroscience Brain, Behavior, and Cognition, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology
3<\/sup>Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology
4<\/sup>Institute of Medical Engineering and Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) flow is crucial for maintaining brain health through waste clearance. However, it is not known whether there are age-related changes in CSF flow in humans, or whether sex differences exist in these changes during aging. To address these questions, we collected structural and functional MRI imaging from young (n=34; 14 male, ages 18-40 y) and older adults (n=36; 17 male; ages 60-85 y). We found that CSF magnitude was significantly lower in healthy aging, with older adults showing a 40% reduction in task-evoked fluid magnitude compared to younger adults. Moreover, CSF flow was significantly lower in older males than in younger males, but not significantly lower in older females than in younger females. We measured CSF flow through the fourth ventricle and examined it for age-related structural changes to explain the differences in CSF flow but found no significant differences across age or sex. Similarly, we found a significant decrease in thalamic size due to age, influenced by sex. Intriguingly, the age-related effect on reduced thalamic volumes was three times larger in males than in females. Our analysis suggests that there are sex differences in age-related mechanisms that impair fluid dynamics and cause gray matter loss in the thalamus.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":3770,"template":"","profile_category":[22],"class_list":["post-3565","profiles","type-profiles","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","profile_category-2024-interns"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oge.mit.edu\/msrp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profiles\/3565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oge.mit.edu\/msrp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profiles"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oge.mit.edu\/msrp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/profiles"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/oge.mit.edu\/msrp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profiles\/3565\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4906,"href":"https:\/\/oge.mit.edu\/msrp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profiles\/3565\/revisions\/4906"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oge.mit.edu\/msrp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oge.mit.edu\/msrp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"profile_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oge.mit.edu\/msrp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile_category?post=3565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}