GBHI Team Receive Multiple Awards for Driving Progress in Dementia Prevention and Care

Atlantic Fellows at GBHI are impacting dementia prevention in many different ways. The fellows are from diverse backgrounds, both in terms of geographical region and academic/ professional focus and a number of them have recently received awards for their brilliant research and professional work.

Jane Bentley is an Atlantic Fellow at GBHI based at Trinity College Dublin. She has been awarded a grant by the Health and Social Care Alliance in Scotland. Jane has developed a group-based musical interaction program which she has created with people with long-term mental health conditions, including dementia. With the 'Rhythms for Life' program she will now develop a training resource, and pilot the formation of two new groups over the next 18 months. Watch this space!

Lorna Roe is also an Atlantic Fellow at GBHI based at Trinity College Dublin. Before her PhD she was a Social Policy Officer, representing the interests of older people in the Irish policy making process. Lorna has been awarded the HRB Applying Research into Policy & Practice Postdoctoral Fellowships 2018 which will allow her to build on her PhD and examine frailty and cognitive impairment as drivers of disability, healthcare use and costs, and implications for caregivers.

As well as current Atlantic Fellows at GBHI, the Atlantic Senior Fellows (alumni) are continuing to drive change following their graduation from the fellowship program.

Liz Dzeng is an assistant professor at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and an Atlantic Senior Fellow. She has been awarded NIH National Institute of Aging GEMSSTAR grant. Her project is titled "Identifying contributing factors to burdensome ICU treatments in older adults with Alzheimer's disease and related dementias in the United States and United Kingdom".

Atlantic Senior Fellows Elisa Resende and Jorge Llibre were each funded by the World Federation of Neurology for $25K each. Elisa’s funding will expand her GBHI pilot project, allowing her to enroll twice as many participants to understand if late-life literacy training impacts dementia risk. Jorge’s project will augment work done by his father to have teams in every province in Cuba to address dementia. It will add to Ana Rodriguez’s work using tablet based cognitive assessments across all provinces and the Conversations with Caregivers films GBHI are creating with The Cuba Platform to provide tools for everyone in Cuba with a dementia diagnosis.

Ioannis Tarnanas is a neuroscientist and was among the first cohort of Atlantic Fellows at GBHI. His company, Altoida recently won the prestigious EIT Innovators Award for their Alzheimer’s disease Prediction Service. Altoida Medical Device is a tool to screen and monitor cognitive outcomes. It supports neurologists to classify patients healthy, at risk, and with Mild Cognitive Impairment. The service is one of the first validated solutions able to predict risk of Alzheimer’s for people over 50. This award was presented to Ioannis as recognition that he is a promising entrepreneur and innovator in Europe and that he has developed a high-impact product for a sustainable future. A video interview with Ioannis is available here.

As leaders of leaders, GBHI directors have also recently been recognized for their work. Victor Valcour, GBHI Executive Director, geriatrician at the Memory and Aging Center at UCSF and professor of geriatric medicine in neurology, has been awarded the 2018 UCSF Best Research Mentor Award for his work in the Division of Geriatric Medicine. Ian Robertson, GBHI Co-Director was recently elected to the Academia Europaea.

The actions of Atlantic Fellows at GBHI, Atlantic Senior Fellows and Faculty are working towards the GBHI mission to reduce the scale and impact of dementia around the world and we congratulate them on these awards which demonstrate the impact and reach they are having in many different regions of the world.