Professor Ngaire Kerse, University of Auckland.
Ngaire is the Joyce Cook Chair in Ageing Well and a Professor of General Practice and Primary Health Care. Since 2010 she has been co-principal investigator of a longitudinal study – Life and Living in Advanced Age: a Cohort Study in New Zealand (LiLACs NZ). Participants include 500 non-Māori who are now 90, and 400 Māori currently aged between 85 and 95 years.
Ngaire is recognised as an international expert in interrelated areas of research, and currently leads several research teams, each engaged in a number of research projects:
- Maximising health for older people: an organised programme of research studying the pathway from impairment to dependence. Projects test activity based interventions to improve function in residential care and for those with depression.
- Falls and older people: studies of falls in older people after stroke, in residential care and in a large sample of primary care patients have led to collaborative teams aiming to prevent falls through intervention development and testing.
- The impact of physical activity on development of disability. Various physical activity trials have led to an understanding of the potential to prevent development of disability.
- Developing Robot Technology for older people with dementia.
After being named in the New Year’s Honours as a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit, Ngaire fell out of her feijoa tree while pruning it and was laid up with a leg wound. Not bad for a falls prevention researcher!
Ngaire is a practicing GP and President of the New Zealand Association of Gerontology (NZAG).