Bailee Brekke is a second-year graduate student at Miami University working toward earning her master’s degree in gerontological studies. She also is a graduate research assistant in the Scripps Gerontology Center at Miami University helping conduct various research projects that support older adults. Her research interests surround policies at the state level that help fill gaps in care for older individuals living in the state of Ohio as well as developing initiatives that support people living with dementia and their care partners. Brekke was the first-ever master’s level student to serve as a GSA Summer Policy Intern.

Kaleigh Ligus, PhD, is a social science research analyst at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation. Her work includes developing, implementing, and evaluating new CMS patient care models aimed at improving Medicare beneficiaries’ health care experiences and health outcomes. Dr. Ligus currently works on the team for the Guiding an Improved Dementia Experience Model. She has been dedicated to serving older adults living with chronic disease since 2015 during her experience at the University of Connecticut (UConn) Health Center on Aging. She earned her doctoral degree in human development and family sciences, with a specialization in adulthood, aging and gerontology, from UConn in 2023. During graduate school, she served as the Greg O’Neill Policy Intern for the Gerontological Society of America (summer 2021) and Health Policy Fellow at AcademyHealth (summer of 2022), working with like-minded community collaborators and political leaders to advocate for health policy change.

Lei Chen, PhD, is a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies. She is a transdisciplinary and cross-cultural researcher whose work focuses on long-term services and supports, immigrants’ access to health care, migrant workforce, aging and health policy, aging and technology, and cross-cultural study. Dr. Chen is working on a National Institutes of Health–funded project that aims to advance research on the health care workforce that serves people living with dementia. She applies quantitative and qualitative methodologies to her research. Before joining UCSF, she worked on several research projects at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Center for Health Policy Research and collaborated with the UCLA Human-Centered Computing and Intelligent Sensing Lab. Dr. Chen also engages in policy-related work such as assisting in developing and implementing the Master Plan for Aging in California.