A collaborative approach to dementia care, support and training

Norman Foster, MD, is committed to developing new methods of more effectively providing care for memory disorders and dementing diseases. He has 30+ years of clinical and research experience in cognitive disorders and dementia. While at the University of Michigan, he developed the first clinical dementia program in that state. In 2005 he was recruited to the University of Utah as Founding Director of the Center for Alzheimer’s Care, Imaging and Research (CACIR), the first academic Alzheimer’s program in the Intermountain West. This provided an unparalleled opportunity to develop innovative approaches to providing sustainable care for patients with Alzheimer’s disease and related disorders. He has taken advantage of this opportunity to recruit skilled and experienced colleagues in this application and to develop Proactive Dementia Care (PDC), an interdisciplinary program that integrates medical dementia evaluations with early education and social work interventions to prevent unnecessary disease complications and care crises.

Troy Christian Andersen, PhD., MSW, MS, LCSW, is a Professor- Lecturer in the College of Social Work at the University of Utah. In this capacity at the University he has taught for 18 years and served as the Executive Director of the W. D. Goodwill Initiatives on Aging.  Dr. Andersen worked for 13 years as a dementia specialist clinical social worker at the Center for Alzheimer’s Care, Imaging and Research at the University Of Utah School Of Medicine and has been associated with Proactive Memory Services Company since incorporation.  Dr. Andersen received his PhD in Social Work with an emphasis in developing proactive dementia care services for individuals in the early stages of the disease and other aging related topics.  In addition to his graduate work in social work, Dr. Andersen also has an MS degree in Gerontology from the University of Utah, College of Nursing.

Edward Zamrini, MD is Co-founder and Director of User Engagement at ProActive Memory Services, Inc. Dr. Zamirini is a board-certified Geriatric and Behavioral Neurologist with more than 30 years of experience caring for patients with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementia and their families. He is the former Director of the Memory Center at Banner – Sun Health Research Institute. He is Adjunct Professor of Neurology at the University of Utah and Adjunct Professor of Clinical Research and Leadership at George Washington University of School of Medicine and Health Sciences. Dr. Zamrini served as Director of the Clinical and Information Transfer Cores at the NIH-funded Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Dr. Zamrini has served as an investigator in over 50 clinical research studies that have focused primarily on the clinical features and pathophysiology of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, neuroimaging with PET and MEG, and novel pharmaceutical treatments. He has been an affiliate of the Alzheimer’s Disease Cooperative Study and a member of the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative. He has published and lectured extensively on his areas of expertise. He will produce content, supervise collation of user feedback and use this information to iteratively improve content and its presentation. He will also assist in the distribution of MemoryCarePartner^© to stakeholders in conjunction with market validation. and will be involved with software design and content, analysis of data and market validation.

Andrea Dremann, JD is Chief Operating Officer at ProActive Memory Services, Inc.  She is an experienced attorney having practiced law for over 30 years, and has worked with ProActive Memory Services, Inc. since 2017.

Daniel B. Kaplan, PhD, LICSW, LMSW, CSW-G, QDCS is a gerontological clinical social worker with expertise in mental and neurological disorders, aging, and social work practice and supervision. He is an Associate Professor and the Faculty Director of the Center for Nonprofit Leadership at Adelphi University School of Social Work. His research includes intervention studies and workforce development initiatives to optimize services, clinical interventions and supportive environments for older adults with mental and neurological disorders living in the community, as well as studies of programs to enhance social work supervision. He is Director of the Social Work Practice Fellows program and the former National Director of Social Services for the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America. Dr. Kaplan holds clinical social work licensure in New York and Massachusetts, as well as an NASW certification in advanced gerontological clinical social work. He earned his doctorate at Columbia University and then held a postdoctoral research fellowship in the NIMH Geriatric Mental Health Services Research program at the Weill Cornell Institute for Geriatric Psychiatry.

Jeanine Stefanucci, PhD is a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Utah. Her area of specialization is human factors and engineering psychology. Her research program investigates how and whether emotional, physiological, and physical states of the body have an influence on how we see, think about, and navigate our environments. She conducts this research in natural, outdoors settings, indoors in hallways or buildings, and in virtual environments (both immersive and desktop). In her 15 years of conducting research, she has conducted many user studies and has consulted with many companies as a usability expert.