Rianna Patterson was the winner of the 2024-25 Routledge/Round Table Commonwealth Studentship award for a PhD student registered at a university in the UK.
She is a Dominican PhD candidate in applied psychology at the University of Nottingham. She is the founder of the Dominica Dementia Foundation, which she founded at eighteen in memory of her grandfather. She has been a voice for older people in forums such as the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting. She was one of the principal authors and researchers on the report, ‘Dementia in the Commonwealth’, that was launched by the Commonwealth Ageing Association (CommonAge) at the International Dementia Conference in Australia. Her contributions to this report included providing autobiographical data from young people’s contributions in several Commonwealth countries on dementia advocacy as well as local government involvement in this field.
Now available: Rianna’s podcast with Dr Ishtar Govia, founder of Amagi Health, explores attitudes to and ways of coping with dementia:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/commonwealth-roundtable-podcast/id1818668405
Rianna has a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Kent and completed a master’s degree in dementia at University College London, where her thesis focused on ‘Dementia Policies in Caribbean Communities’. To her knowledge this was one of the first publications to focus on English-speaking Caribbean countries. Her research fits in a global agenda of developing national dementia plans as suggested by the World Health Organisation.
Rianna said that she intends to use the Routledge/Round Table Commonwealth Studentship award to contribute to improving the quality of lives of people living with dementia in marginalised communities including African and Caribbean populations, by creating evidence-based research that could influence systematic and health policy change in Caribbean countries in engagement with global organisations such as the Commonwealth Secretariat and the Commonwealth Foundation.
Find out more about the Routledge/ Round Table Commonwealth Studentship awards.
