Wilma Sue Tilton Griffin, born January 25, 1934, is an American neuroscientist best known for her contributions to the role of neuroinflammation in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative conditions. She devised a "cellular cycle" by which interleukin-1 and other paracrine factors cooperate with each other to create a "feed-forward" collaboration, thus creating a hypothesis for a progressive disease. Griffin is the Alexa and William T. Dillard Professor in Aging Research and Director of Research at the Donald W. Reynolds Institute on Aging at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. She is also the founding editor of the journal Neuroinflammation. Griffin grew up in western Arkansas and attended high school in Fort Smith. After graduation, she moved with her parents to Los Alamos, New Mexico, where she worked for the Atomic Energy Commission and met and married her husband, Edmund Griffin. Ed was also a native Arkansas native and worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory helping to determine the biological effects of ionizing radiation. The couple had two sons, Edmund II and Clay. Sue Griffin received her BS and MS degrees in nutrition from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. In 1974, she received her Ph.D. in physiology from the University of Rochester School of Medicine. After receiving her Ph.D., Griffin was a fellow at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. In 1986, Griffin moved to her home state of Arkansas to take a position in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, where her laboratory was already located at Arkansas Children’s Hospital. Although ostensibly committed to the neurological abnormalities in Down syndrome, her laboratory pursued a link between the condition and Alzheimer’s disease. In 1989, Griffin published an article demonstrating that the immune system, interleukin-1, was elevated in both Down syndrome and Alzheimer’s disease. This represented one of the first published links between Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. Griffin went on to explain how this inflammation contributes to the formation of amyloid plaques, neurofibrillary tangles, and Lewy bodies in the brain in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, as well as its association with genetic variations that confer a higher risk of Alzheimer’s in some individuals. In 2016, Griffin received the Alzheimer’s Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award at its international conference. In 2018, she was inducted into the Arkansas Women’s Hall of Fame.