Maria P. Pavlou, MD

Dr. Pavlou is a geriatrician clinician-researcher in the Division of Geriatrics at Weill Medical College of Cornell University. She is a graduate of Yale University, and received her medical degree from Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons. She trained in internal medicine at the New York Presbyterian Hospital-Columbia Medical Center, and after working abroad in the field of international medicine with various disenfranchised populations, completed a geriatric medicine fellowship at Cornell University Medical Center. She subsequently joined the faculty at Cornell in 2005 as the recipient of the Weill Cornell-Hartford Center of Excellence in Geriatrics Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. Dr. Pavlou’s research focuses on understanding the complex syndrome of self-neglect in older adults. As a Brookdale Fellow, Dr. Pavlou will explore putative risk factors of self-neglect through estimating the prevalence of medical, functional, and psychosocial impairments and conditions in an ethnically diverse population of self-neglecting older adults compared to a non self-neglecting group. She will also create a clinically and community relevant research agenda in self-neglect, that integrates the perspectives of both academicians and front line “responders” to self-neglect on the local and national level, using community based participatory research techniques. Dr. Pavlou’s goal is not only to use these results to design interventions that will ameliorate or prevent the adverse outcomes of self-neglect, but on a larger scale bring to bear the expertise of academicians and practitioners in this field through community based participatory research, as a model for approaching other similar complex geriatric problems.