Dr Thekla Brunkert (University of Manitoba) joined TREC as a postdoctoral fellow working with Dr Malcolm Doupe at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. Thekla started her career as a physiotherapist. After working in different healthcare settings in Germany and Switzerland, she pursued a Master in Health Sciences at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland. In 2019, Thekla completed her PhD at the University of Basel, Switzerland. Her PhD project focused on the development and implementation of a multilevel intervention to improve pain management in care homes. Her research interests include implementation science and health services research focusing on the provision of geriatric care. With TREC she is involved in the scale-up activities of the Safer Care for Older Persons (in residential) Environments (SCOPE) project in Manitoba.

Dr Stephanie Chamberlain (University of Alberta) is a postdoctoral fellow with Dr Andrea Gruneir (Department of Family Medicine, University of Alberta) and Dr Susan Bronskill (Institute for Clinical and Evaluative Sciences, Toronto). Her postdoctoral work is funded by an Alzheimer Society of Canada postdoctoral fellowship. Her research aims to assess the residents in supportive living settings health service use. Stephanie will examine the transitions and trajectories of residents who are socially isolated or lonely

Dr Yinfei Duan (University of Alberta) is a postdoctoral fellow with Dr Carole Estabrooks. She holds a PhD in nursing from the University of Minnesota. Her research interests include studying quality of life of older adults in long-term care, and the interplay among individuals, psychosocial, and environmental factors in shaping the well-being of this population. She is experienced in conducting health service research and performing advanced statistical analysis (e.g., multilevel modeling, structural equation modeling, psychometric analyses) based on large datasets including the Minimum Data Set (MDS) data. She is currently working on the Influence of Context on Implementation and Improvement (ICII) project.

Dr Sahar Nazari (University of Alberta) is a postdoctoral fellow working with Dr Adrian Wagg (Department of Medicine, University of Alberta) and Dr William Gibson (Department of Medicine, University of Alberta). Sahar has a PhD in Statistics. In her postdoctoral research, she is developing statistical methods of data analysis in public health. In particular, she is working on the projects related to predicting the development of incontinence in older adults receiving home care services.

Dr Yuting Song (University of Alberta) is a post-doctoral fellow with the Safer Care for Older People (in residential) Environments (SCOPE) intervention. She completed her PhD in August 2017 and started the postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Carole Estabrooks in September 2017. She holds a PhD in Nursing from Duke University (U.S.) and a Bachelor’s degree in Nursing from Shandong University (China). The focus of her research is improving the quality of care in long-term care settings. Particularly, her doctoral work focused on understanding residents’ care needs related to pain and functional limitations and how the care environment supports or fails to support residents’ care needs. She has developed strong expertise in conducting mixed-method research during her doctoral work. In line with her research interests, she aims to develop quality-improvement interventions that integrate both residents, family members, and formal caregivers in providing high-quality care for long-term care residents.

Katharina Choroschun is a graduate of the Master of Public Health at Bielefeld University. She is a researcher at the Institute for Population and Health Research at the School of Public Health at Bielefeld University. Katharina is working under the direction of TREC investigator Dr Matthias Hoben. She is examinung the challenges of covering an increasing need for care in Canada and Germany against the background of a demographically induced increase in the need for care. Her research interests include long-term care and cross-national comparisons. Securing long-term care is a major problem in aging populations because of the growing need for long-term care and the expected decline in the working age population. Crosscountry collaborations and comparisons open up new opportunities for use and range of TREC data.

Kelsey Holt (Dalhousie University) is a medical student in the class of 2021. She completed a BSc with Combined Honours in Neuroscience and Russian Studies from Dalhousie in 2016. Kelsey’s interest in care of the elderly stems from working in a long term care facility in Halifax since she was 16 years old. Her project examines how environmental factors in long term care facilities influence responsive behaviours of residents.

Ibo MacDonald (University of Ottawa) is a Doctoral student in the School of Nursing (Faculty of Health Sciences) at the University of Ottawa supervised by Drs Janet Squires and Ian Graham. Ibo has worked in the long-term care (LTC) sector for over 12-years as a health care aide, nurse and director of care. Her most recent role at the Registered Nurses' Association of Ontario as a long-term care best practice coordinator, had her assisting LTC homes with the implementation of best practice guidelines. These experiences have helped to develop her research interest in best practice utilization by health care aides. Her research will explore unit-level research use (i.e., use of best practices) by health care aides in LTC through secondary analysis of TREC 1.0 data.

Tim Rappon (University of Toronto) is a student in the M.D./PhD program at the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation and a Vanier Scholar. His clinical training in a rehabilitation and complex care hospital in the first year of the MD/PhD program led to an ongoing and evolving interest in the ways in which the care of complex older adults is organized and delivered. Under the supervision of Drs. Whitney Berta and Samir Sinha, his research examines the sustainability of quality improvement programs in elder care settings. As a TREC Trainee, Tim is studying an intervention to sustain gains in quality of care obtained through a health care aide-led quality improvement initiative (SSaSSy). He is also leveraging the TREC Survey data to explore how health care aides’ work life impacts their work outcomes and the care of residents in long term care homes.

Bianca Shieu (University of North Carolina at Chapell Hill) is interested in researching long term care, transitional care, and quality of life improvement with a focus on the under 65 population. She graduated with honors from Oakland University in Michigan with a Bachelor of Science degree in Nursing, and is currently a BSN to PhD student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Bianca worked as a research assistant at a long term care facility for six months to conduct perspectives on how the Asian populationtakes care of their elderly in nursing homes and assisted living centers..

Trina Thorne (University of Alberta) is a Doctoral student with Dr. Carole Estabrooks. She completed her MN, Adult Nurse Practitioner program with a specialization in aging. She works for Alberta Health Services in Supportive Living & Long Term Care, Edmonton Zone. Her research objective is to improve the quality of life of long term care residents. The sequelae of psychological trauma in older adults with moderate to severe dementia is insufficiently studied. A trauma informed intervention has the potential to provide guidance on how to reduce adverse responses to health services, and guidance on strategies to limit trauma responses (e.g., aggressive behaviours of dementia). The outcomes would benefit both residents and their daily care providers and could be generalized to other settings where older adults with dementia interact. She will undertake a multi-phase project providing an empirical basis for reducing trauma responses such as aggression, establishing a foundation for large scale clinical trials.

Megan Campbell (University of Manitoba) is a Master of Science student in the department of Community Health Sciences at the University of Manitoba supervised by Dr. Malcolm Doupe. She has a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in Sociology from the University of Manitoba. Megan has worked as a research assistant at the University of Manitoba’s Centre on Aging, as well as the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy. Her current research interests include older adults and their pathways of care through the health care system. Her Master's thesis concerns the pattern of emergency department use for older adults, in particular those with cognitive impairment, who are waiting for admission into personal care homes.

Helen Doan (University of Alberta) is a Master of Nursing student supervised by Dr. Carole Estabrooks. Helen has worked in elder care in various roles, from healthcare aide to floor nurse. Throughout her years as a caregiver Helen has focused on the utilization of best-practices and quality improvement for both patients/residents and their families. Currently, Helen is the Director of Nursing at a facility where she institutes and maintains programs in collaboration with the interdisciplinary team to reduce: wounds, falls, catheters, end-of-life discomfort, overprescribing, and inappropriate antipsychotic use. By working with the TREC team, her goal is to discover innovative ways to further the knowledge and development of best-practices for elder care.