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Mary Jo Pugh, PhD, RN

Professor/Research Career Scientist
University of Utah/VA Salt Lake City
Salt Lake City, Utah, United States

Integrating her training as a Veteran, a nurse, and a developmental psychologist Dr. Pugh developed a research program to examine the long-term sequelae and outcomes of military exposures. Over the past decade she has targeted her work using VA data to identify phenotypes in populations with complex comorbidity such as those with traumatic brain injury (TBI) and complex multi-symptom illness. Dr. Pugh’s current work related to TBI includes longitudinal observational and prospective studies to identify the emergence of distinct neurodegenerative conditions such as cognitive impairment, dementia, epilepsy, and clusters of multimorbidity that may have similar or networked biological underpinnings. The longitudinal observational studies of approximately 2.5 million Veterans currently link Department of Defense (DoD) combat theatre and health system data with VA health system data with self-reported survey and ecological momentary assessment data with primary data collection including neuroimaging, neuropsychological testing, and current biomarkers. These studies aim to understand which individuals are at highest risk of epilepsy, dementia, other neurodegenerative diseases, mental health conditions, and deficits in functional outcomes after TBI. They also investigate the possibility of using personalized medicine to address treatment choices by using deep learning models to identify optimal treatment pathways for specific phenotypes to inform treatment guidelines for TBI in the context of multimorbidity.

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