Meryl Comer

Meryl Comer

Board Member; Founding Member, WomenAgainstAlzheimer's

Meryl is President and CEO of Geoffrey Beene Foundation Alzheimer's Initiative, which promotes early diagnosis, virtual innovation challenges, m-health technologies and national public service campaigns. She is a Co-Founder of WomenAgainstAlzheimer's and Founding Partner of the Global Alliance on Women's Brain Health. Meryl is also Co-Principal Investigator for the PCORI Alzheimer's, Dementia, Patient & Caregiver Powered Research Network (funded by PCORI), a partnership of the Mayo Clinic, UCSF Brain Health Registry and UsAgainstAlzheimer's. She is a veteran broadcast journalist. Her New York Times bestseller, Slow Dancing with a Stranger: Lost and Found in the Age of Alzheimer's (HarperCollins) is an unflinching account of her husband’s early onset Alzheimer’s disease and a “much-needed wake-up call for an honest dialogue about this fatal neurodegenerative disease.” All of the proceeds support Alzheimer's research.

Bucket list item: Travel the world

A woman is like a teabag. You never know how strong she is until she's in hot water.

Eleanor Roosevelt

Meryl’s Story

Two decades ago I would never have imagined myself still on the Alzheimer's journey, but here I am. There is no way for me to escape the disease because it fills my life 24/7 caring at home for both my husband and my mother. What is most important to share is that it was the trustee of the Geoffrey Beene Foundation, Tom Hutton, who recruited and believed in me enough to support a new foundation around early AD diagnosis that over the years has become critical to prevention research. Any awards I've received are a tribute to what philanthropy enabled me to do. The other personal transformation occurred when I teamed up more than a decade ago with George and Trish Vradenburg as tireless AD advocates and close personal friends.

There is no question that being an advocate has saved my life. Join US.