Grant: Summer Program in Aging

I am a post-doctoral fellow in Vision Science at the School of Optometry, Université de Montréal. My research interests focus on sensory-cognitive aging and health, specifically aiming to overcome barriers to healthcare, functioning, communication, and social participation for older adults with sensory and cognitive impairments. With a health equity lens, my CIHR funded postdoctoral research aimed to explore challenges faced by older Canadians with concurrent hearing and vision loss (dual sensory loss) in navigating the healthcare system during the COVID-19 and identifying tools/strategies to improve their access to healthcare and health information during and post-pandemic. With my supervisor, Dr. Walter Wittich, who is the Co-Lead of Team 17 (Interventions at the Sensory-Cognitive Interface) at the Canadian Consortium on Neurodegeneration in Aging (CCNA), I have been actively contributing to Team 17 activities in sensory-cognitive research and associated knowledge translation. Through the Summer Program in Aging (SPA) 2022, I will be able to advance my knowledge of the CCNA work on all three themes (prevention, treatment, and quality of life) and further refine my skills with respect to networking, communications, knowledge translation, grant writing and key considerations for conducting aging research. The study of existing policies and practices, research priorities, and a range of methodological approaches through the SPA will help advance my career as an emerging sensory-cognitive aging research scientist in Canada. Moreover, the SPA training will provide access to experts' mentorship and help me team up with established and emerging researchers from diverse disciplines or using various methodologies to design interdisciplinary aging research to generate empirical evidence on sensory-cognitive aging in Canada. The learning from the SPA will also strengthen my existing COVID-19 research and help me to translate evidence to clinical practice and health policy.