Sylvie Dobrota Lai

Sylvie Dobrota Lai is a fourth-year PhD candidate in Epidemiology and Population Health at Stanford School of Medicine. Her research sits at the intersection of aging, digital health, and epidemiology. She uses novel data streams to study how older adults age in place and what predicts cognitive and functional decline after stroke. Her dissertation study, Cardinal LifeSpace, recruits participants from StrokeCog, a long-term stroke survivor cohort in the Buckwalter lab. The study deploys a custom smartphone app developed by the Odden lab, which passively collects GPS traces and Apple HealthKit data alongside short daily surveys. Together, these streams offer a granular view of how stroke survivors interact with and navigate their environments. More broadly, Sylvie's research explores how digital phenotyping can extend traditional epidemiologic methods to capture the everyday experience of aging. She holds a BA in Molecular and Cellular Biology with a Neuroscience concentration from UC Berkeley.