Krister Håkansson is a PhD student at the Aging Research Center, Karolinska Institutet. His main supervisor is Miia Kivipelto and his co-supervisors are Bengt Winblad and Abdul Mohammed.

Krister has over 30 years of experience as teacher of psychology at the Linnaeus University, where he still teaches part-time in parallel with his PhD studies. His main teaching interests are psychobiology, cognition, cross-cultural psychology and organizational psychology.

The focus of his PhD work is the role of socio-emotional factors in midlife for cognitive health in later life and how this association is modified by genetic risk factors. The results of the first study showed that living alone after losing a partner relatively early in life was associated with a seven-fold risk of Alzheimer’s disease, and the risk was even higher for persons who also carried the ApoE 4 allele. Follow-up results indicate that feelings of hopelessness and loneliness also constitute risk factors independent of marital status.