The Global Goals
In 2015, UN member states agreed to 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all. Tomasina's work contributes towards the following SDG(s):
About Tomasina
Key information from profile summary:
- Researcher supported by a fellowship awarded by the National Institute for Health & Care Research (NIHR) Applied Research Collaboration South West Peninsula (PenARC) and Alzheimer’s Society.
- Currently working on person-centred dementia care, with a focus on planning for the future (advance care planning) to enable living and dying well
- International experience in university leadership roles, teaching, supervision
- Experience in different research methods gained from working on a range of research projects
- Developing interest/expertise in realist health economic evaluation; global health; citizen science and AI in health and social care
I am an applied dementia researcher and NIHR Dementia Capacity Building Research Fellow, whose work is focussed on how to achieve person-centred care for people living with dementia and their carers. As an academic I have a range of international experience in university leadership roles, teaching and supervision.
Since my PhD I have led and/or worked as part of various research projects employing different research methods and approaches. For example, my early research sought to understand the interaction between typical and atypical language/communication, cognition and the brain in people with schizophrenia (those with and without the symptom of formal thought disorder). This work later expanded to include bilingualism – motivated in part by moving from England after my PhD to Malaysia and then Singapore, where almost everyone is at least bilingual. Methods employed in this research included analysing spoken language, cognitive neuropsycholgical assessments of comprehension and cognition, experimental design and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
My current research is related to person-centred dementia care. From 2019-2024 I was programme lead and a researcher on the D-PACT (Dementia PersonAlised Care Team) project. This programme of research (2018-2024) was funded by the NIHR to develop and evaluate an intervention comprising a dementia support worker based in primary care. Via D-PACT I gained experience in (i) managing a large programme of research; (ii) developing and enhancing ways of including people with dementia – including those who lack cognitive capacity and those from under-served communities – in all aspects of the research process; and (iii) employing a realist, mixed-methods approach to evaluation as an alternative method to the randomised controlled trial, including realist-informed economic evaluation.
My current NIHR fellowship is focused on how to improve advance care planning and reduce unplanned or unwanted high-level care (e.g. hospitalisations), particularly for conditions like dementia where trajectory is uncertain. Multiple long-term conditions, affecting about three quarters of people living with dementia, add to this complexity and uncertainty. Advance care planning plays a role in promoting person-centred and integrated care; however questions remain around who, how and in what contexts this happens, well as on the economic implications of advance care planning. Both are methodologically challenging to measure and interpret, requiring more nuanced tools.
Alongside this work I have a developing interest in the use of citizen science and AI in health and social care. I am also keen to understand how different global health and social care contexts influence the delivery of person-centred dementia care and am working with colleagues in Malaysia as part of this.
Supervised Research Degrees
Previous
- Lim Li Koon, Reading processes in biscriptal children in Singapore
- Masnidah Masnawi, Imageability and verb-noun naming in Aphasia: Can the effect of grammatical class be reduced to differences in imageability?
- Philina Ng, Fusiform gyrus: Investigation of visual word recognition in the bilingual brain
- Seng Su Lin, Bilingual language control and switching
Current
- Waine, H. Functional grammatical development in children with Developmental Language Disorder
Teaching
I have taught undergraduates and postgraduates in the following areas:
- Psycholinguistics/Advanced Psycholinguistics
- Child Language Acquisition
- Introduction to the Neurocognition of Language
- Introductory Linguistics
- Linguistics Frameworks (for Speech & Language Pathology)
- Bilingualism
