Our events

The Reimagine Ageing Network was kicked off in October 2023 by the Leeds University Horizons Institute and since then, we have held eight interdisciplinary events with around 350 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.

On 11 September, we celebrated our work so far with the Reimage Ageing Showcase, a fully packed day where all attention was on how to improve the lives of older people. We looked back and mostly ahead to the future, focusing on the following three 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, Wellbeing and Quality of Life (keynote speaker: Dr Rowan Bailey, Reader in Cultural Theory and Practice, Director of Centre for Cultural Ecologies in Art, Design and Architecture – University of Huddersfield)
• Healthy Ageing and Society (keynote speaker: Professor Debora Price, Professor of Gerontology, Sociology – University of Manchester)

In addition to the keynote speakers, the Showcase featured 9 short presentations and 14 poster presentations, right from understanding older women’s participation in electronic dance music culture to designing smart textiles for detecting loneliness in older people.

There were about 70 participants at the event in Nexus Leeds, networking and sharing ideas across disciplines on the day but also going forward.

Winner of the best poster presentation for general audience was Garry Barker: “Drawing Age: A brief account of an artist working with older people to visualise their lives and offer wellbeing activities”.

Winner of the best oral presentation was Ali Mair: “Improving memory for recent events in people with mild cognitive impairment and healthy older adults”.

Read the full event programme​​​

This lunchtime webinar focused on how to develop inclusive research with older adults. 

Jo Volpe, who is CEO at Leeds Older People’s Forum, spoke of their work with and for older people in Leeds. It is a membership organisation with a network of 69 member organisations whose aim is to bring about real change for older people.

In terms of researchers collaborating with older people, Jo emphasised the importance of involving them actively from the beginning, being mindful of diversity, using plain English and finding out their motivations and support needs. She also recommended talking about the impact of the research in question and not least communicate the results afterwards, preferably in person. 

The second speaker was Akeela Mohammed, who we came to know through Ethnic Minority Research Inclusion (EMRI). Akeela is the Director of the ‘Healthy Her’ not-for-profit group in Doncaster, which provides support to unrepresented communities and creates safe spaces for Muslim women to exercise and share new experiences.

She and a couple of the group members spoke of some of the barriers to engaging with ethnic minorities in research. There can be language and cultural barriers, for instance, and Akeela recommended finding and using an organisation or group such as this to reach ethnic minorities and get them involved in research.

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. However, researchers sharing their work across disciplines and creating a community within data science and ageing, 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.

Join our community

If you are interested in joining a growing community of researchers and clinicians harnessing data science to improve care and wellbeing in later life, please register your details via the Academic Unit for Ageing and Stroke Research (ASR).

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.