Keynotes

Professor Myrra Vernooij-Dassen has been trained as a medical sociologist and for many years she was the director of the Radboud Alzheimer Centre. She is affiliated to the Scientific Institute of  Quality of Healthcare of the Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, the Netherlands and is visiting professor at the Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, the biggest and oldest University in Indonesia. She is chair of INTERDEM, a pan-European research network on detection and timely Intervention in Dementia. She is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the European Joint Programme Neurodegenerative Diseases (JPND). She published more than 250 (inter)national peer reviewed articles. In 2016, Professor Vernooij-Dassen received the IPA 2016 distinguished service to the field of psychogeriatrics award.

Mary Mittelman is research professor of Psychiatry and Rehabilitative Medicine at NYU School of Medicine and the director of the New York State-funded NYU Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Disorders Family Support Program. Trained in psychiatric epidemiology, she has been developing and evaluating psychosocial interventions for people with cognitive impairment and their family members for three decades.   Dr. Mittelman was developer of the NYU Caregiver Intervention (NYUCI). A randomized controlled trial of the NYUCI, was funded for 20 years by the National Institutes of Health, and the results have been published widely.  In addition to the many replications and translations in the United States, the NYUCI has been used in Canada, Israel, the United Kingdom and Australia.  Dr Mittelman also founded and established the effectiveness of a chorus for people with dementia and their family members in 2011; the Unforgettables Chorus is still rehearsing and giving regular concerts.

Debra Morgan, PhD, RN, Canadian Academy of Health Sciences Fellow, is Professor and Chair in Rural Health Delivery, Canadian Centre for Health and Safety in Agriculture, Department of Medicine, University of Saskatchewan, Canada. Her research focuses on health service delivery for rural people living with dementia and their caregivers, including specialist and primary health care services. Debra is director of the Rural and Remote Memory Clinic, and leads the Rural Dementia Action Research (RaDAR) research program. RaDAR is a community-based participatory research program that relies on stakeholders to inform and guide all phases of our research (www.ruraldementiacare.usask.ca). She co-leads Team 15 (Rural) in the Canadian Consortium on Neurodegeneration in Aging (CCNA), which brings together over 350 dementia researchers in 19 teams across Canada. She also holds a 7-year grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research focused on co-designing, implementing, sustaining, and scaling up primary care interventions for dementia, including memory clinics, in rural and remote settings.

Wiesje van der Flier (1975) is full professor and head of clinical research of Alzheimer center Amsterdam at Amsterdam UMC, the Netherlands, where she works since 2004. She studied neuropsychology at the University of Utrecht. In addition, she is clinical epidemiologist. She leads the Amsterdam Dementia Cohort, an ongoing memory-clinic based cohort including over 6000 patients with deep phenotyping (MRI, EEG, CSF biomarkers, and PET) and linked biobank (blood, DNA, CSF). The Amsterdam Dementia Cohort is at the basis of many of the studies performed at the VUmc Alzheimer center. Van der Flier has been (co)promotor of >20 theses and is currently supervising ~10 PhD projects. Van der Fliers main research areas are looking for the origin of AD, diagnosis&prognosis, and intervention&prevention. Together with colleague Philip Scheltens, she has written a book, het Alzheimermysterie, which was published by the Arbeiderspers.

Doctor Michael Brainin is the President of the World Stroke Organization and is a professor and chair of the Department of Clinical Neurosciences and Preventive Medicine at Danube University in Krems, Austria. He has acted as PI or co-PI in numerous stroke-related drug and intervention trials, has published 220 pub-med listed papers, edited three textbooks on stroke and has given more than 1,000 invited lectures. He is Senior Editorial Consultant for Stroke, acted as Associate Editor of the European Journal of Neurology (2007-2019) and currently is a member of the editorial boards of Neuroepidemiology, International Journal of Stroke, The European Stroke Journal and The Journal of Neurological Sciences.

Dr. Soeren Mattke is a Research Professor of Economics and the Director of the Center for Improving Chronic Illness Care at the University of Southern California. The Center focuses on the design, implementation and evaluation of innovative approaches to organizing, financing and delivering care for chronic conditions, in particular those that are commercially sustainable. A current focus of the work is a research program to prepare health systems worldwide for the advent of a disease-modifying Alzheimer’s treatment. Prior to joining USC, Dr. Mattke was a Senior Scientist at RAND Health, where he led the private sector healthcare practice, and worked at the OECD in Paris on benchmarking healthcare systems in industrialized countries, in the healthcare practice of Bain & Company in Boston, at Abt Associates, a policy consulting firm in Cambridge, MA, and at Harvard University. He trained as an internist and cardiologist at the University of Munich and got his doctoral degree in health policy at Harvard.

Debby Gerritsen (Winterswijk, 1973) trained as a psychologist at Radboud University. She obtained her PhD in 2004 at VU Amsterdam on research into the quality of life in nursing homes. As a scientific project officer at Stichting Verenigde Amstelhuizen Amsterdam (2003-2005), Gerritsen contributed to the development of a demand-driven and client-oriented care process. She also worked as a psychologist at the Slotervaart Nursing Home in Amsterdam.
At the Heyendaal Institute of Radboud University, she initiated research into Dementia.

Iva Holmerova is a Geriatrician and she additionally holds a PhD in Social Gerontology.  She is the founder of the Czech Alzheimer Society and for many years she was its Chairperson. Since 2016, Iva is the Chairperson of Alzheimer Europe.  She is an Associate Professor of anthropology at Charles University (Prague) and was named Visiting Professor at the University of the West of Scotland in 2014. She is also the founding Director of the Centre of Gerontology (since 1992), until 2019 she was President of the Czech Society of Gerontology and Geriatrics and a committee member of the International Association of Gerontology and Geriatrics (IAGG) and European Geriatrics Society (EuGMS). She is a practicing physician since 1981. Her experience is not only a professional one: her mother died with dementia in 2018.