Four investigators, including three UNMC medical students, recently were honored for their research into Alzheimer’s disease and other conditions related to aging.
Janelle Beadle, Ph.D., of the University of Nebraska at Omaha, is the 2016 Vada Kinman Oldfield Scholar in Alzheimer’s disease Research.
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From left, Brianna Harder, Paige Scholer and Sasha Kapil were the Reagan Scholarship Fund awardees. |
Brianna Harder, Sasha Kapil and Paige Scholer, medical students at UNMC, each received the Nancy and Ronald Reagan Alzheimer’s Scholarship Fund Award.
Dr. Beadle, a professor of gerontology at the College of Public Affairs and Community Service at UNO, is exploring how caregiver compassion fatigue affects patient outcomes in Alzheimer’s Disease.
The Oldfield funds provide a great opportunity to continue her work with Alzheimer’s disease, Dr. Beadle said.
“This project is focused on understanding caregiver burnout and compassion fatigue, but also some of the emotional changes in Alzheimer’s disease and how that affects the caregivers,” she said. “So by looking at it bi-directionally, both in the caregivers and in the patients with Alzheimer’s disease, I’m hoping to better understand their well-being and how to benefit a patient outcome, as well.”
Scholer is currently involved with the Functional Monitoring Module of the Dementia Care Ecosystem Study.
The purpose of Harder’s study is to describe rates of advance directive completion among patients with dementia.
Kapil is assisting with the Caregiving Branch of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and UNMC Dementia Care Ecosystem Project.
The Reagan Awards allow medical students to present at national conferences.
“Next year, we’re hoping to put together posters and go and present, which will be a great experience for us,” said Kapil. “I’ve never done that before in all the years that I’ve done research.”