My research is deeply rooted in my geriatric psychiatry clinical practice that serves as a “living laboratory” that brings into focus research issues that are relevant to patients living with dementia (PWD) and their family caregivers (CG). Practice fuels my passion and drives my resolve to use research to make a difference in lives of PWD and their CG and allows me to have perspective of what assessments and interventions can be translated and broadly disseminated into routine clinical practice. My scholarship focuses on informing the design of a new component of health care delivery for PWD and their CG by generating evidence, creating measurement tools and developing interventions aimed to support clinicians and CG working together to prevent avoidable health crises of both CG and PWD and to enable CG to manage the health of their care recipients without sacrificing their own health and wellness. This new approach to healthcare delivery considers PWD/CG to be a unit of care and provides clinicians with tools for iteratively assessing the needs of PWD/CG, for identifying gaps in medical and psychosocial services, and for offering targeted supportive interventions to the dyad.

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