Ann leads an innovative non-profit organization called TimeSlips, which brings meaning, purpose, joy and connectedness to older adults through engagement training, tools and products for family, friends, and professional caregivers. Prior to her current role, she worked in various capacities for the Office of Aging and People with Disabilities (APD) within the Oregon Department of Human Services (ODHS), developed and taught college courses in aging, and worked as a consultant and in long-term care facilities. She is especially interested in the experiences of people living with dementia and in helping to create a world that affords them the respect, dignity, safety, and companionship that all human beings deserve. Ann has presented at various conferences, both locally and nationally on topics related to aging, dementia and dementia care, and the role of humor in the lives of older people.

Nirmala Dhar is a licensed clinical social worker with a Master’s in Social Work from the Brown School of Social Work, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri and Bombay University, India. She is mission driven and has a passion to work with the most vulnerable clients, often with cross sector complex care needs. Nirmala has worked for 36 years in all aspects and programs of behavioral health in the public sector in Missouri, New Jersey and Oregon. She is a senior policy analyst and the Older Adult Behavioral Health Services Coordinator for Oregon Health Authority ‘s Health Systems Division. In this position she is the Older Adult Behavioral Health Initiative Project Director, the PASRR Level II Coordinator and subject matter expert for her Division. She is the Project ECHO Geriatric Behavioral Health Champion at OHA. Prior to this position she worked for Clackamas County Behavioral Health for 18 years. This included 10 years as the geriatric mental health specialist for the County. She has provided trainings on a variety of topics over the past twenty years locally and nationally and enjoys coaching and mentoring new clinicians. Her areas of professional interest include healthy aging, social justice, workforce development, quality improvement, health metrics , intersection of law and mental health and service delivery innovations. Nirmala lives in Lake Oswego with her husband Sanjay.

Walter Dawson is a lifelong advocate for people living with Alzheimer’s disease and their family care partners. Dawson is an Assistant Professor at the Layton Aging and Alzheimer’s Disease Center at the OHSU School of Medicine and a Senior Atlantic Fellow with the Global Brain Health Institute at the University of California, San Francisco and Trinity College Dublin. He also holds an appointment at PSU’s Institute on Aging. His research focuses on the intersection between macro-level health policy and health services research to better support individuals living with dementia and their care partners. A Fulbright Scholar, Dawson’s research has been supported by the NIA, Commonwealth Fund, Alzheimer’s Association, and Atlantic Institute.

Dr. Hodges is recently retired as the Bain Chair of Geriatric Medicine and Regional Medical Director for the Senior Health Program in Providence-Oregon. She studied medicine at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York before moving to Oregon to do her internal medicine training at Oregon Health and Science University. She pursued her geriatric medicine training at the Portland VA and University of Washington. Since joining Providence in 1992, she was primarily a clinician educator, teaching internal medicine residents about geriatrics, ethics and palliative medicine and seeing older adult patients in a part-time practice. With the encouragement of the daughter of one of her patients with Alzheimer’s disease, she co-wrote Help is Here: When someone you love has dementia, a guidebook for family members of persons with dementia, first printed in 2014 and now on Amazon in English and Spanish. In the Senior Health Program, she co-directed a Geriatric Mini-Fellowship for Providence primary care providers, which has trained almost 30 PCPs over the last 5 years. . She chairs SPADO 2A focusing on primary care education in dementia.