Our events

Join the Reimagine Ageing Network for a lunchtime webinar where we will hear from local representatives from Leeds Older People’s Forum (LOPF22) and Ethnic Minority Research Inclusion (EMRI23) on the best ways to involve older adults in research.

This event will explore how community organisations and research networks can help you develop your research to be more inclusive, following our earlier event in May “How to meaningfully involve older people in research” (you can join this webinar even if you did not attend the May webinar).

Older people are voices seldom heard in research, and this webinar will show you how to improve both the quality and the relevance of your research by introducing you to ideas around recruitment, best practice, inclusivity, building trust and forming meaningful collaborations.

Venue: Nexus Leeds

The Network was kicked off in October 2023 by the Leeds University Horizons Institute and since then, we have held six interdisciplinary events with well over 200 participants from various disciplines and sectors. The Network has also ignited a great deal of networking that will hopefully result in cross-disciplinary collaboration to the benefit of later-life health and wellbeing.

The Showcase will celebrate the work so far, looking back and in particular ahead to the future, and will focus on the following themes:

• Healthy Ageing, Digital and Healthcare Technology (keynote speaker: Dr Thomas Jackson, Associate Professor and Visiting Consultant in Geriatric Medicine, Institute of Inflammation and Ageing – University of Birmingham)
• Healthy Ageing and Wellbeing (keynote speaker TBC)
• Quality of life and Healthy Ageing and Society (keynote speaker: Professor Debora Price, Professor of Gerontology, Sociology – University of Manchester)

In addition to our three keynote speakers, there will be short oral presentations, poster presentations and a workshop to discuss the next phase of development for the Reimagine Ageing Network.

Submissions

To present your work at the Showcase for oral or poster presentations, please submit your abstract by Friday 12 July.

At this conference, we focused on later-life health and wellbeing and big datasets. There were three University of Leeds keynote speakers: Professor Andy Clegg, Dr Kate Best and Dr Sam Relton, as well as five abstract presentations ranging from the development of AI models to predict joint replacement risk to using smartphone track and trace data to understand the mobility behaviours of older people.

This led to an engaging discussion on the challenges of doing research related to ageing, and it was expressed that ageing research does not always get the biggest attention or funding opportunities, but by researchers sharing their work across disciplines and creating a community within data science and ageing, this will lay a strong foundation for research benefitting older people and society. 

The conference also welcomed a presentation on the role of software engineering in computational research. It was underlined how essential it is to consider reproducibility and reuse of scientific codes already in the initial phase of a research project.

The elderly population and their communities are voices seldom heard in research, and this event was aimed at researchers looking to involve older people in their work.

Tried and tested means of involving older adults from diverse communities were on the agenda, with speakers coming from backgrounds in engineering and healthcare.

Dr Ioannis Delis, School of Biomedical Sciences, introduced the speakers and the Reimagine Ageing Network. Dr Zhiqiang Zhang from the Schools of Electronic and Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering presented an engineering project proposal for use in older adults.

Dr Oliver Todd, School of Medicine, discussed key principles and practical and easy steps to involving older people in research and presented a case study – a blood pressure project designed together with older people. He pointed out that a lot of research is carried out ‘with’ or ‘by’ members of the public rather than ‘to’, ‘about’ or ‘for’ them and advised researchers to involve PPIE experts at an early stage and to include carers and family members as stakeholders, which can improve both the quality and the relevance of the research in question.

This event gave an overview of the ‘impact agenda’ (in higher education policy since 2007), in the context of the University and of Higher Education and the Research Excellence Framework (REF) more broadly. ‘Understanding the Impact Agenda’ had three speakers from the University of Leeds.

In his presentation, Dr Ged Hall, Academic Development Consultant, discussed how to build impact into research and underlined the importance of not getting lost in definitions but letting one’s own values in research be the guide of what is significant. Elizabeth Garcha, Head of Research Quality and Impact, discussed institutional approaches and support for impact. She noted that impact in higher education accelerated after it was included as part of the assessment in the Research Excellence Framework 2014, making impact much more ‘business as usual’ and part of the funding environment these days. 

The last speaker, Professor Andrew Clegg, Head of Academic Unit for Ageing and Stroke Research, spoke on delivering and evidencing impact from ageing research. He shared a case study ‘electronic frailty index’ (eFI) that has involved a huge range of people and seen national implementation in providing a method for identifying frailty in older people in routine practice.

Interdisciplinary approaches are needed to solve the global challenge of ageing. This event focused on how to use this Network as a platform to develop interdisciplinary research ideas and funding proposals.

Our first speaker was Ulla Kriebernegg, Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Ageing and Care (CIRAC), University of Graz in Austria, who shared best practices and talked about challenging experiences in bringing together researchers working in a transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary way (online presentation).

The next speaker was Samantha Aspinall, Head of Interdisciplinary Research at the University of Leeds and currently on secondment to UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) to develop their cross-research council funding scheme and set up their interdisciplinary assessment college, and she discussed interdisciplinary research development and funding within UKRI with concrete examples.

Participants not only networked informally, but were also tasked with coming up with concrete research ideas across the table (literally) in smaller groups.

We welcomed over 40 colleagues to the Reimagine Ageing – Arts and Ageing event held at the stage@leeds. Attendees were a mix of both internal and external academic researchers, arts practitioners and colleagues from a range of different external organisations that support work with older people. There was a packed programme of talks, performance, Q&A sessions and round-table discussions, and artwork was displayed throughout the day.

The academic papers and presentations provided different examples and models in which the arts serve as a methodological tool in research on ageing, whereas contributions from regional organisations discussed the way the arts fit with public policy on creative health. 

The day was divided into four sessions; Researching Performance Practices and Older Adults; Arts, Ageing and Public Health; Ageing and Arts Making; Ageing and Everyday Aesthetics. There was also the chance for participants to meet each other and exchange information about their research and practice particularly focussing on the methods that are used in their work. 

The topics of the event spanned from ageing burlesque bodies and their costumes to post-retirement short film making and meaningful self-expression through creativity in older age, which made for a very unique experience.

Ageing well in a digital world is an opportunity to reimagine how we can support and empower an ageing population to lead fulfilling lives. In November 2023, the Reimagine Ageing Interdisciplinary Research Network hosted an afternoon event with interactive discussion on the design and use of digital tools for an ageing population.

Digital technology can, for instance, enhance medical tools for early disease detection, monitoring, and prognosis and help older people stay connected and live independently in their homes longer. However, there are challenges. We need to ensure that digital health technologies are inclusive, easy-to-use, and scalable as well as digital spaces being ethical and transparent. Also, any technologies must protect the human rights of the older person.

This event welcomed colleagues from across four faculties from the University of Leeds as well as external colleagues from other institutions. And representatives from 100% Digital, a programme co-led by the digital inclusion team in Leeds City Council, came to present their work and participate in the workshop sessions.

The event was opened by the Co-leads of the Network, who shared the aims and ambitions of the Reimagine Ageing Network. A workshop session was facilitated to encourage networking and share research ideas linking to the theme, and the event featured presentations by three speakers:

• Professor Arunangsu Chatterjee – Dean of Digital Transformation and Professor of Digital Health and Education, University of Leeds
• Professor Helen Thornham – Professor of Feminism, Technology & Society and Principal Investigator of the Inclusive Digital Economy Network+
• Jen Rhodes – Assistant Digital Inclusion Officer at 100% Digital Leeds, which partners across Leeds to strengthen digital inclusion infrastructure.

The presentations and much of the discussion focussed on digital inclusion/exclusion, which had been identified as one of the main challenges from the questions posed to who those who had registered for the event.