Fern Rodgers is a PhD student at UCL in the Better Conversations lab (Department of Language and Cognition). Her work focusses on the concept of dose, intensity, and scheduling in speech and language therapies for dementia.
Prior to starting her PhD, she worked as a Research Assistant on the UTILISE-1 and UTILISE-2 projects, as well as on the SOCIAL study of social cognition in Alzheimer’s disease.
Gwen Brekelmans is a teaching-focussed lecturer in Psychology at Queen Mary University of London. She is passionate about teaching and investigating the means to improve on it, in particular relating to the teaching of research methods and academic writing. Outside of this, her general research interests lie in speech perception and production, second language learning, sociolinguistics, and combinations of these.
Anna Volkmer is a speech and language therapist and NIHR Doctoral Research Fellow in the Language & Cognition department at UCL. She is supervised by Dr Suzanne Beeke within the Language and Cognition department and Dr Aimee Spector, in the Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology. Anna's research is focused on refining and piloting a conversation training intervention for people with primary progressive aphasia and their conversation partners. The program is based on the Better Conversations for Aphasia (BCA) program developed for post stroke aphasia and is entitled Better Conversations with PPA (BCPPA). The BCPPA program is currently being piloted across a number of NHS sites.