The EnACT-Dem project team is located across three countries and six field sites. You can meet the team below.
Canada
EnACT Dem’s Canadian team oversees the Thunder Bay and Vancouver field sites.
Dr Elaine Wiersma
Thunder Bay
Elaine is the Director of the Centre for Education and Research on Aging & Health, and an Associate Professor in the Department of Health Sciences at Lakehead University. She has completed her Master’s and PhD at the University of Waterloo.
Having spent many years working with older adults in practice and research, particularly individuals with dementia, Elaine’s research aims to tell people’s stories in ways that challenge stereotypes and misconceptions of older people, particularly persons with dementia.
Advocacy, inclusion, and rights form the fundamental values underlying her work with people with dementia. Using participatory qualitative methodologies, her research spans community and long-term care, exploring aging and dementia care, contexts of rural and northern communities, and quality of life issues.
Dr Alison Phinney
Vancouver
Alison is the Principal Investigator of the Building Capacity Project. She is a Professor and the Associate Director of Graduate programs at the University of British Columbia, School of Nursing, as well as the Co-Director of the Centre for Research on Personhood in Dementia.
She is an expert in dementia, with her work highlighting the potential for people to live well with the disease and as active members of their communities, bringing hope and understanding to families and society. She works in partnership with community leaders and people with lived experience to build knowledge and capacity for supporting personhood and social citizenship of older people, especially those living with dementia and their families.
She has demonstrated the importance of social involvement and creative and physical activity for supporting well-being and personhood in dementia.
Dr Eric Macnaughton
Thunder Bay and Vancouver
Eric is the Research Manager, responsible for overall management of the project, and coordinating the implementation of new dementia initiatives across the two sites, as well as the research and evaluative aspects of the project.
He has a Ph.D. from the UBC Interdisciplinary Studies program, has completed graduate training in community psychology, and has twenty-five years of doing community-based research, evaluation, and knowledge translation in the field of community mental health. Most recently he was involved in the At Home/Chez Soi project, an initiative to implement, evaluate and scale out a model for providing housing and supports for previously homeless people who deal with mental health and addictions issues.
His interest in dementia stems from his family background and with the similarities in the mental health’s recovery movement and the aims of this project in building social citizenship for people living with dementia.
Prof. Dr Reimer Gronemeyer
Giessen
Reimer studied in Hamburg, Heidelberg, Edinburgh and Bochum. He holds doctorates in theology and sociology.
Reimer has been Professor of Sociology at Justus Liebig University in Giessen since 1975. Next to his interest in ageing and the social perspective on dementia, Reimer has done scholarly and practical work in the context of the palliative care movement for many years. A third major area of work and dedication is devoted to the African continent and particularly his scientific and practical work in Namibia. Reimer has led several research projects in all of these three fields. As part of a broad discourse project organised by the Robert Bosch Foundation, he was among the founding members of Aktion Demenz (2006), a civic organisation which he has been chairing ever since. Last but not least, Reimer is an honorary senator of Justus Liebig University Giessen.
Dr Gabriele Kreutzner
Falkensee and Giessen
Gabriele studied American Studies, English and German in Tübingen and Stony Brook (N.Y.). Her academic work and interests are closely linked to both gender-sensitive and feminist issues and based on an understanding of CULTURE developed and influenced within the contexts of international Cultural Studies.
Her professional life is characterised by activities in applied contexts. This particularly holds true for the last twenty something years spent in the dementia field. Gabriele spent most of that time as member of a small team devoted to building up a Dementia Centre for Knowledge Translation and Dialogue. Since her first encounter with the field of dementia, a central concern has been to bring academic and public attention to the voices and perspectives of those immediately affected by the condition. Gabriele has worked as a translator, editor, author and researcher. In terms of practice-oriented activities, she has co-founded a hiking programme for people with and without dementia. She is coordinator of that programme and has been out and about with her local hiking group for the past ten years.
Dr Jonas Metzger
Giessen
Jonas studied Social Sciences at the Justus Liebig University in Gießen. In August 2020, he completed his PhD on sociocultural aspects of local seed systems and transformation processes in smallholder societies in East Africa.
Since 2011, he has been involved in various research projects at the Institute of Sociology (chair Prof. Gronemeyer) in the fields “Food Security in Sub-Saharan Africa” and “Aging Societies in Europe”.
In 2019 Jonas took a position at the Institute of Special Education and Inclusive Education (chair: Prof. Dr. Reinhilde Stöppler). Here, he is responsible for the field of Geragogy and teaches on issues of education in old age for people with and without disabilities.
Dr Oliver Schultz
Giessen and Falkensee
Oliver studied Fine Arts and German Studies in Mainz (Germany) and Dijon (France). Since 2001, he has been leading the project “Art and Encounter” – art groups for people with dementia in various nursing homes. He holds a doctorate from the Faculty of Interdisciplinary Research and Continuing Education (IFF) at the Alpen-Adria University of Klagenfurt and Vienna (both Austria). He also completed his dissertation on the aesthetics of dementia at the Institute for Palliative Care and Organizational Ethics in 2018.
Oliver has a long-standing engagement with art practices and people with dementia and a career of doing social research which promotes a relational care perspective. This makes him both a practitioner in dementia care and an interdisciplinary scholar in dementia research.
Professor Andrew Clark
Greenwich
Andrew has a PhD in Human Geography from the University of St Andrews.
He completed research posts at The Open University and University of Leeds before moving to the University of Salford where he worked for 15 years, becoming a Professor of Sociology in the School of Health and Society in 2018.
In October 2023 he moved to the University of Greenwich in southeast London where he is the Professor in the Institute for Lifecourse Development. Andrew has long been interested in how different people experience everyday life in neighbourhood settings as well as in developing innovative and creative methods.
Dr Richard Ward
Stirling
Richard Ward (he/him) is the project lead for EnAct Dem. He is a registered social worker with a background in social work and social care.
Richard’s research is focused on the experience of dementia and the provision of dementia care with a particular interest in developing participatory and co-productive approaches. He previously led a 5-year study on dementia and neighbourhoods as part of a larger ESRC/NIHR funded programme and this led to co-leading a dementia enabling community development project in Stirling called Our Connected Neighbourhoods. Richard co-edited ‘Dementia and Place’ a book that pulled together international research on community-based experiences of living with dementia.
He is also the co-founder of the Critical Dementia Studies Network which has a particular focus on questions of equity and social justice in a dementia context. As part of this role he is a co-commissioning editor of the ‘Dementia in Critical Dialogue’ book series (Routledge) and co-editor of the introductory book of this series ‘Critical Dementia Studies: An introduction’, which is open access.
Dr Mary Njoki
Stirling
Mary is a Research Fellow at the University of Stirling currently working on two projects: An ESRC funded project Centring the lived experiences of dementia within policy, practice and community development (EnactDem) and also on the UKRI-funded Designing Housing for Healthy Cognitive Ageing (DesHCA) ending February 2024. This project aims to identify scalable innovations in housing design to support longer and healthier lives for people experiencing cognitive change, including dementia.
Mary holds a PhD in dementia. Her PhD explored the experiences of Black and Minority Ethnic people living with dementia using Direct Payments. Mary also has an MSc in Applied Social Research and an MSc in Social Work and has practised as a social worker for seven years.
Mary’s research interests are dementia, ageing, experiences of Black Minority and Ethnic people’s access to services, self-directed Support mainly Direct Payments, the intersection of dementia, age, gender, class, and ethnicity.
Dr Gill Eaglestone
Greenwich
Gill is a Research Fellow at the University of Greenwich. Gill studied Health and Social Care at the Canterbury Christ Church University. She is a registered nurse with a background in clinical research. She has worked on various research projects at the University of Kent and Canterbury Christ Church University.
In 2021 Gill moved to the University of Greenwich to undertake a PhD in Human Sciences. Her PhD explores the cost and effectiveness of non-drug therapies, such as music therapy for people living with dementia.
Gill has been engaged with community artwork projects for many years, helping to improve mental health and reduce social isolation for older people and people living with dementia.