我要吃瓜

Dr Mary Njoki is a Research Fellow at the 我要吃瓜. Currently working on Centring the lived experience of dementia within policy, practice and community development (ENACT-DEM project). This is an ESRC-funded international research project led by a team at the 我要吃瓜 in collaboration with a team in London, Canada and Germany. The project aims to understand how people living with dementia, individually, within their networks and neighbourhoods, overcome exclusion and participate in their communities.

In Feb 2024 Mary concluded working on an UKRI-funded Designing Housing for Healthy Cognitive Ageing (DesHCA) project. This project aimed to identify scalable innovations in housing design to support longer and healthier lives for people experiencing cognitive change, including dementia.

Mary holds a PhD in dementia. Her PhD explored the experiences of Black and Minority Ethnic people living with dementia using Direct Payments. Mary also holds an MSc in Applied Social Research and an MSc in Social Work. She has also practised as a social worker for seven years.

Mary is interested in improving services for people living with dementia in the community that would lead to improved quality of life.

Mary is interested in ageing and dementia and also in relation to environment especially the concepts of dementia friendly or age friendly environments, cities and communities.

Mary is also interested in person-centred approaches that are more empowering offering more choices, flexibility and control to the individuals.

Mary’s research interests are dementia, experiences of Black Minority and Ethnic people’s access to services, self Directed Support mainly Direct Payments, the intersection of dementia, age, gender, class, and ethnicity.