Jennifer Merrilees, RN, PhD
Jennifer Merrilees received her doctorate degree in nursing from the University of California, San Francisco. She is a Clinical Nurse Specialist in Geriatrics at the Memory and Aging Center and Associate Clinical Professor for the UCSF School of Nursing.
Jennifer’s work focuses on family caregivers, management of dementia-related behavioral symptoms, and the design and implementation of care models that support people with dementia and their family caregivers. She co-founded a nurse-run clinic focused on dementia behavior management. She is a lead researcher for the Care Ecosystem, a model of supportive dementia care that is being implemented at several sites around the country. Jennifer is co-investigator for NIH-funded projects that seek to characterize the nature of emotions experienced by dementia family caregivers. She co-leads an oral history project, hear/say, that focuses on collecting personal stories about the experience of aging, dementia and caregiving.