Professor Evonne Miller

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. 

Professor Norah Keating

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).

Dr. Ashleigh Barret-Young

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.

Coming soon!