Professor Evonne Miller

Keynote speaker: Friday 5 December 2025 (morning)

Professor Evonne Miller is Professor of Design Psychology at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and Director of the QUT Design Lab. She is the inaugural Queensland Health Research Chair in Healthcare Design, based within Clinical Excellence Queensland’s Healthcare Improvement Unit where she collaborates with clinicians, consumers, and communities to co-design creative improvements to healthcare systems.

An internationally recognised thought leader in design for health, Evonne’s research investigates how our built, social, natural, and technological environments can be reimagined to promote health, wellbeing, and quality of life—particularly in later life.  She works in close partnership with different populations (older people in residential aged care, people in prison, with disabilities, chronic health conditions, and at end of life) and frequently deploys creative research methods - poetry, photography, drama, drawing, digital storytelling, drawing, interactive art, textile art, painting, cartoons – to engage and educate. She has led and curated large public exhibitions on residential aged care, senior living, caregiving, voluntary assisted dying, childhood brain cancer, rehabilitation, mental health and staff wellbeing, as well as the experience of bowel cancer screening for people with disabilities. 

Evonne has secured over A$6 million in competitive research funding and authored more than 140 publications. Recent academic books include Creative Arts-Based Research in Aged Care: Photovoice, Photography and Poetry in Action, Redesigning the Unremarkable (with Debra Cushing, Routledge) and How Designers Are Transforming Healthcare (with Satyan Chari & Abbe Winter, Springer). Evonne is a Fellow of the Australian Association of Gerontology (AAG) and was chair of the 56th annual conference in 2023. Her current research projects include co-designing AI for grief,  Grandschools (re-designing urban form, co-locating high schools with senior living, to foster intergenerational interactions), evaluating robots in care homes and social prescribing for families. 

Presentation abstract: Ageing by Design: Creativity, AI and the Future(s) of Care 

Population longevity is transforming our world, inviting us to imagine new ways of caring, connecting, and ageing—where design, creativity, and technology converge in unexpected ways. In this presentation, Professor Evonne Miller outlines five key trends and opportunities shaping the future(s) of ageing and aged care - and what that means for us as researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and consumers. 

From co-design, design thinking and arts-based research methods (photography, poetry, drama, drawing, digital storytelling) that foster connections and empathy, to robotics, virtual reality, and intergenerational design in aged care, this presentation explores how creativity and technology are re-shaping the future(s) of ageing and care.

Professor Norah Keating

Keynote speaker: Thursday, 4 December 2025 (morning)

Norah Keating’s career has been devoted to understanding environments of ageing and the social, policy and personal contexts that can exclude older persons. She has masters’ degrees in Developmental Psychology and in Marriage and Family Therapy, and a PhD in Lifecourse and Ageing.

Professor Keating and holds academic appointments in three world regions: University of Alberta, Canada; Stirling University, UK; and North-West University, South Africa. She is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences; the Academy of Social Sciences (UK); and the Gerontological Society of America. She has held professional appointments as President of the Canadian Association on Gerontology; Chair of the North American Region of the International Association of Gerontology and Geriatrics; and Chair of the Board of Directors of the Vanier Institute of the Family. In 2017 she was awarded the International Association of Gerontology and Geriatrics Presidential Award for the global reach of her international work.

Recent publications that address global issues in contexts of ageing include:  A Research Agenda for the Decade of Healthy Ageing; Conceptualising and Measuring the Social Care Economy; and Migration and urbanization trends and family wellbeing in Canada: A focus on disability and Indigenous issues. She is an academic advisor to research programs on Families and Care Networks of Older Adults led by Professor Marjolein Broese van Groenou (Netherlands); Family Caregiving of Older Persons in Southern Africa led by Prof Elena Moore (South Africa); and Modifiable Pathways to Sustainable Ageing in Aotearoa led by Professor Fiona Alpass, (New Zealand).

Presentation abstract: Ageing Together? Who are the families of older persons?

We hold powerful but disparate understandings of families. They differ across countries, regions and personal biographies, informing understandings of who comprise a family and of the place of families in the lives of older adults. Governments draw on beliefs about families to create policies that frame the public/family balance in responsibility for care. Across the world regions, the predominant policy approach is familism by default, in which families are viewed as best suited to meet the needs of their members. 

In contexts of aged populations and worries about reduced family caring capacity, Professor Keating argues the timeliness of problematising families--asking who are these families on which we rely so heavily: who are family members; how do they share formal and informal work that sustains them; what are their patters of obligation and support. She discusses a set of lenses that help us see families that were developed to address questions of national importance in Canada and suggests how these can assist nations to review public policy from immigration to pension systems toward facilitating family wellbeing of older persons. 

Dr. Ashleigh Barrett-Young

Keynote speaker: Thursday, 4 December 2025 (afternoon)

Dr Ashleigh Barrett-Young is a Research Fellow at the University of Otago | Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka. She is a lifecourse researcher with research interests predominantly in biomarkers of brain ageing and social and structural determinants of health, such as social connection, socioeconomic position, and access to healthcare services. Her research is designed to address critical questions for translation from bench to clinic, such as how biomarkers perform in community-dwelling, middle-aged people with comorbidities, and whether there are particular cultural considerations that may influence implementation of future screening programmes.

Dr Barrett-Young’s PhD thesis, awarded in 2021 and designated by the University of Otago as being of exceptional quality, used data from the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study to examine retinal biomarkers of cognitive decline in midlife. In 2023, she was awarded a Health Research Council Project Grant to investigate blood-based biomarkers of dementia in the Dunedin Study members at the age 52 assessment. As Alzheimer’s disease pathology may begin to accumulate decades before diagnosis, middle-age is now seen as an ideal period for investigating the early indicators of Alzheimer’s-related pathology for potential future interventions.

Dr Barrett-Young will discuss recent findings from the Dunedin Study on brain ageing and cognitive decline and discuss how the Dunedin Study is becoming a valuable source of information on age-related processes, now that the Study members are moving into late middle-age.

Presentation Abstract: From Birth to Biomarkers: Lifecourse Insights on Ageing from the Dunedin Study

Middle age is increasingly recognised as a pivotal period in the life course, during which numerous factors influencing the trajectory of ageing begin to emerge. A growing body of evidence indicates that biological processes associated with both normative ageing and age-related diseases often originate in midlife. Importantly, interventions aimed at promoting healthy ageing tend to be more effective at delaying or mitigating health issues when implemented in midlife. Collectively, these findings highlight the importance of middle age as a dynamic and critical window for extending both healthspan and lifespan. 

The Dunedin Study, a longitudinal birth cohort initiated in the 1970s, offers an opportunity to investigate these processes, with participants now aged 52 years. Researchers from the Dunedin Study are contributing to the fields of geroscience and gerontology through lifecourse approaches, including the development of a biomarker of biological ageing that predicts age-related disease risk (DunedinPACE), and investigations into blood biomarkers of preclinical Alzheimer’s disease. In this presentation, Dr Barrett-Young will highlight recent findings from the Dunedin Study, illustrating the unique contributions that birth cohort studies can make to our understanding of ageing processes across the lifecourse.  

Ms Katrina Anne Pōtiki Bryant

(Waitaha, Kāti Māmoe, Kāi Tahu, BPhty, MPhty)

Keynote speaker: Wednesday, 3 December 2025 (afternoon)

Ms Bryant has been a practicing physiotherapist since 1994. She is driven to address equity for Māori accessing rehabilitative and preventative services, with a special interest for integrating indigenous movement practices into rehabilitation.

Ms Bryant is the Associate Dean Māori and Senior Lecturer at the University of Otago School of Physiotherapy, supporting the University's Māori Strategic Framework and Kaupapa Māori Research. She is also employed by Te Rūnanga o Ōtākou Taurite Tū Ltd as Project Lead, overseeing Taurite Tū strength and balance programme for pakeke and kaumātua research and delivery across Aotearoa.

She is involved in the successful Australia and New Zealand bid to host the IAGG congress 2030, driving indigenous perspectives of aging throughout the programme.

Presentation Abstract: He Taura Takata: Ageing Together, what that can look like from a Te Ao Māori perspective.

Taurite Tū is a kaupapa Māori wellness approach that has evolved from a community falls prevention research project. As the team from Taurite Tū Ltd work to gather the mission, vision and values that guide this kaupapa into future, the concepts raising out of the kōrero talk to key perspectives, offering reflection on what does ageing together look like from a te Ao Māori perspective. This presentation will introduce attendees to the award winning Taurite Tū kaupapa, lessons learnt along the journey from Kaupapa Māori research to implementation and development of strategic plan into the future, guided by indigenous philosophies handed down through the centuries on how to age well together.