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Supporter Profile:
We also work in partnership with other
community organizations and are the
grateful recipients of subcontracts from
the following partners:
 Health Resources and Services
Administration (HRSA) with the
University of Southern California
 Administration for Community Living
(ACL) with:
● AltaMed
● Alzheimer’s Orange County
● California Department of Aging
● Little Tokyo Service Center
● Motion Picture Television Fund
● WISE & Healthy Aging
 Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention (CDC) with
UsAgainstAlzheimer’s
 County of Los Angeles Workforce
Development, Aging and Community
Services with Santa Clarita Valley
Senior Center
 California Department of Public Health
(CDPH) with:
● Dr. Maria Aranda at the University
of Southern California
● County of Los Angeles Department
of Public Health
WHY I GIVE
Dr. Mirella Diaz-
Santos, PhD
Speaker’s Bureau volunteer,
virtual walk4ALZ® participant,
Visionary Women’s committee
member, and monthly donor
Dr. Mirella Diaz-Santos is an adjunct assistant professor in
the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at
the David Geffen School of Medicine, director of research of
the Hispanic Neuropsychiatric Center of Excellence at Semel
Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, and research
psychologist at the UCLA Mary S. Easton Center for Alzheimer’s
Disease Research.
Mirella’s maternal grandmother, Estrella Ortíz, passed
away in 2007 after complications from Alzheimer’s. When
Mirella’s family had begun noticing her grandmother getting
disoriented, she was found dangerously walking alongside
a highway. When her grandmother was diagnosed, nobody
explained what dementia or Alzheimer’s was. The doctors said
there was nothing they could do, the family had no support,
and it felt like a death sentence.
Mirella shares, “Everything I do is honoring my grandmother
as well as my mother’s pain, ours, and mine. She never saw me
graduate from college, or graduate school, or even when I began
as a neuropsychologist and faculty at UCLA. But I do know she is
watching me from above. Hope I am making her proud.”
Mirella joined the UCLA Mary S. Easton Center’s virtual walk4ALZ
team in 2020, donated on her own page, and later turned it into
a monthly donation. “I understand that money is necessary for
[Alzheimer’s LA] to provide [free] programs and services to the
community,” says Dr. Diaz-Santos.
We are grateful for supporters like Dr. Diaz-Santos who commit
to engaging and educating the community.
You can read Dr. Mirella Diaz-Santos’s full story by going online
to AlzheimersLA.org/mirellas-story