GBHI Community Awards and Publications Summer Round Up

The GBHI community continues to produce high quality publications across international journals and media outlets, and receive awards and funding to help them deliver and implement innovative projects and research. Our community members are also regularly recognised for their work and invited into leadership positions across institutions and networks. Below we highlight their recent achievements which support them and GBHI in achieving our shared brain health goals.

Awards and Funding

Alissa Bernstein, Atlantic Senior Fellow, recently received an NIH K01 grant for ‘Mapping the Dynamics of Caregiver Burden in Alzheimer’s Disease’ which will provide her with 5 years of funding.

Atlantic Senior Fellow, Siobhan Casey has secured STG £160k funding to choreograph a new check-in and chat service at Age NI to help isolated and vulnerable older people during the COVID-19 pandemic, following a 50% increase in calls from older people to the existing Age NI Advice and Advocacy helpline. Siobhan and Age NI also teamed up with Northern Irish former athlete Lady Mary Peters to launch an exercise program aimed specifically at keeping older people moving during the extended Covid-19 lockdown. You can watch a video here.

SOLIDARITY GRANTS

In recognition of the extended range of challenges and critical scenarios Atlantic Fellows are facing in their work, the Atlantic Institute launched a new responsive suite of Solidarity Grants, designed to provide targeted support and resources to scaffold and scale Fellows’ collective work to minimise the impact of COVID-19 on at risk and vulnerable communities. The Atlantic Fellows for Equity in Brain Health responded robustly to this call and 11 fellows to date have received funding for initiatives responding to loneliness and social isolation, virtual connection, and health support for at risk groups, digital cognitive training, photo reportage, and more. Fellows who have received awards to date include: Phaedra Bell, Rowena Richie, Sandra Higuet, Joni Gilissen, Alex Kornhuber, Maritza Pintado Caipa, Rogerio Panizzutti, Christine Fitzgerald, Fernando Peres, Mohamed Salama, Yaohua Chen, Sanjib Saha, Dvera Saxton, Krystal Culler, Eleonore Bayen, Karin Diamond. 

Atlantic Fellow Olakunle Adewale was awarded a grant from the U.S. Department of State for his Art Responders Healing Project which will cover 6 local Government areas in Lagos Nigeria affected by COVID-19. Kunle also received a day named for him in 2019 by John Cranley, the Mayor of Cincinnati, Ohio. For the 2020 event, he organized a two day virtual event: Artists as Drivers of Social Change. This was covered by media here and here. 

Atlantic Fellow, Lorna Roe, has been elected to the Board of the College at Trinity College Dublin for the period 2020 - 2024.

Atlantic Fellow Joni Gilissen was awarded the Scientific Prize McKinsey & Company in recognition of a PhD in exact sciences, applied sciences, social, economic or management sciences, or biomedical sciences.

Atlantic Senior Fellow Lenisa Brandão was recently elected as the President of the Aphasia Association of Rio Grande do Sul.

Atlantic Fellow, Cheyenne Mize was asked to join the Build Back Better,Together initiative by the Louisville City Government on the Arts & Culture focus area team.

Atlantic Fellow Wilby Williamson became a  member of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland (RCPI).

Publications

Atlantic Fellow, Ignacio Illán-Gala, was recently awarded the "Agustí Codina i Puiggròs” award by the Catalan Society of Neurology, in recognition of the most relevant scientific paper published in Catalonia. The paper is entitled Cortical microstructure in the behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia: looking beyond atrophy and was published in the journal Brain. The paper combined participants from the Catalan Frontotemporal Dementia Initiative and the Memory and Aging Center.

Ignacio and Atlantic Senior Fellow Maria Carmona-Iragui also recently had a paper published in the Lancet entitled Clinical and biomarker changes of Alzheimer’s disease in adults with Down syndrome: a cross-sectional study.

Atlantic Senior Fellows Greg Walsh, Fiona Walsh and Walter Dawson recently published a paper entitled Late-Life Brain Health Architecture: Leveraging Convergence Science Principles in The American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry. Greg and Fiona also published a report in collaboration with the Health Service Executive (HSE), Age Friendly Ireland (AFI) and the National Dementia office (NDO): A Dementia Inclusive Audit of key areas within the Primary Care Centre Clonbrusk, Athlone. 

Walter Dawson published the report Mitigating the Impact of the COVID-19 Outbreak: A Review of International Measures to Support Community-Based Care, LTCcovid.org, International Long-Term Care Policy Network, CPEC-LSE

Tala Al-Rousan co-published a commentary piece in The San Diego Union-Tribune about how refugees must not be left behind in the U.S. response to the coronavirus pandemic. 

Atlantic Senior Fellow Stelios Zygouris and GBHI faculty Iracema Leroi published a paper entitled The influence of diversity on the measurement of functional impairment: An international validation of the Amsterdam IADL Questionnaire in eight countries in Alzheimer's & Dementia: Diagnosis, Assessment & Disease Monitoring.

Atlantic Senior Fellow Jalayne Arias published a paper entitled Matter of Intent: A Social Obligation to Improve Criminal Procedures for Individuals with Dementia, in The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics

Atlantic Fellow, Eimear McGlinchey and GBHI faculty Mary McCarron have published a paper entitled Down syndrome and dementia: advances in the field in Current Opinion in Psychiatry and Eimear was involved in a second recent paper, Imaging Biomarkers in Neurodegeneration: Current and Future Practices in Alzheimer’s Research and Therapy.

Atlantic Fellow Jennie Gubner recently published Transforming Undergraduate Student Perceptions of Dementia Through Music and Filmmaking in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society which showed that arts and music courses can affect students' perceptions about dementia, create new educational opportunities about this condition and motivate them to collaboratively work towards addressing the needs of our rapidly aging populations.

Atlantic Fellow Joni Gilissen published two recent papers: Nurses’ self-efficacy, rather than their knowledge, is associated with their engagement in advance care planning in nursing homes: A survey study in SAGE Journals and International COVID-19 Palliative Care Guidance for Nursing Homes Leaves Key Themes Unaddressed, in the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management, collaborating on the latter with numerous current and senior fellows across nine countries.

Atlantic Senior Fellow Yue Leng and GBHI faculty Kristine Yaffe recently published a paper Circadian activity rhythms as a prodromal feature in incident Parkinson's disease in JAMA Neurology.

Atlantic Senior Fellow Geeske Peeters and GBHI Faculty Rose Anne Kenny and Sean Kennelly published Understanding the aetiology of fear of falling from the perspective of a fear-avoidance model - A narrative review in Clinical Psychology Review.

Atlantic Fellow Marcela Mar Meza published an article entitled Los retos de la atención a las personas adultas mayores durante la pandemia on Noticias SER.PE.

Atlantic Fellow Yaohua Chen was invited to write an editorial comment for the European Journal of Neurology on the impact of Covid-19 on people living with cognitive disorders. 

Atlantic Fellows, Fernando Aguzzoli-Peres, Laura Booi  and Maëlenn Guerchet published pieces on the World Young Leaders in Dementia Network blog entitled Dementia and Covid-19: Facing the challenge together (Fernando), A Collective Call to Action on Cognitive Reserve (Laura), and A journey from Nigeria to France about Maëlenn’s career path and experience with the organization

Atlantic Senior Fellow Agustin Ibañez was featured in the Alzheimer's Association ISTAART Newsletter for the "Manual de Buenas Prácticas Para El Diagnóstico de Demencias" which will provide basic standards and guidelines for the diagnosis of dementia across Latin America, as well as tools and strategies for public and private healthcare providers in rural and urban areas.