Suzanne Tyas

Suzanne Tyas is an Associate Professor in the School of Public Health Sciences at the University of Waterloo. Her research focuses on identifying strategies to preserve cognitive abilities in aging populations, with an emphasis on factors influencing cognitive resilience and Alzheimer’s disease risk. She holds a BSc in Human Biology/Biomedical Sciences from the University of Guelph, an MSc in Pathology from Western University, and a PhD in Epidemiology and Biostatistics from Western University.

Her work examines lifelong factors affecting cognitive aging, including early-life indicators (e.g., academic performance, multilingualism) and late-life health behaviors. She leads the Epidemiology of Cognitive Aging and Resilience Research Group, which investigates how social, biological, and environmental factors interact to influence cognitive outcomes.

Dr. Tyas supervises graduate students in aging-related research areas such as Alzheimer’s risk factors, predictors of healthy aging, and cognitive decline trajectories. She teaches epidemiologic methods and aging epidemiology, emphasizing rigorous quantitative approaches to public health challenges.