Past PhD Students
Elena Guseva, PhD
elena.guseva@mail.mcgill.ca
Elena received her BFA in Art Education and Psychology and MA in Creative Arts Therapies from Concordia University in 2017. Elena is a member of the American Art Therapy Association. Her interdisciplinary background stems from her continued interest in therapeutic work with dementia populations.
Working under the supervision of Dr. Machelle Wilchesky, Elena aimed to establish art therapy as an effective and safe non-pharmacological option for the management of neuropsychiatric symptoms in dementia patients. Cognitive decline accompanied by visual pathology, specifically in the Alzheimer’s type of dementia, restricts the range and effectiveness of therapeutic interventions that can be employed for people with advanced stages of the disease. Elena’s project involved the development and assessment of visually enhanced dementia adapted art therapy interventions by collecting neuropsychological data using wearable devices. This project aimed to overcome a well- documented limitation of past studies: the difficulty associated with quantifying intervention effects given the communication challenges inherent to participants with advanced dementia.
Deniz Cetin-Sahin, PhD
deniz.sahin@mail.mcgill.ca
A trained physician, Dr. Deniz Cetin-Sahin obtained her MSc degree in Experimental Medicine at McGill University in 2012. Her roles in large projects on delirium in long-term care homes, chronic physical diseases and depression among community-dwelling older adults, and elder-friendly emergency department care led to her research interest in interdisciplinary geriatric care.
She joined the CRA team as a research fellow in 2014 and completed her doctoral studies in Family Medicine and Primary Care at McGill, under the supervision of Dr. Machelle Wilchesky. Her doctoral project, awarded by the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Santé, was predominantly on interventions aimed at reducing potentially avoidable acute care transfers from long-term care homes, including evaluating their effectiveness and improving approaches for their analysis. Beyond its methodological contributions and clinical implications, her dissertation will lead to a novel observational study protocol. This protocol will ultimately be executed and its results will be moved into recommendations for action with long-term care front-line physicians and nurses, residents and families in the CIUSS-Ouest-de-l’ile-de-Montréal.
Past Masters Students
- Stephanie Ballard, MSc
- Matteo Peretti, MSc
- Kathleen (Kayte) Andersen, MSc
Interns
- Brandon Azimov
- Arielle Grossman