Meet the trainers

Dr Kathy Peri is an academic gerontology nurse specialist and senior lecturer at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She has been co leading the implementation, training and research of CST in Aotearoa New Zealand for the past five years. She is currently involved in adapting CST for Māori and Pasifika people and is a member of the Centre of Brain Research and coordinates the dementia mate wareware care post graduate papers at the University of Auckland.

Dr Cheung is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Medicine at the University of Auckland and a Consultant Old Age Psychiatrist at Auckland District Health Board. He co-leads the dissemination and research of CST in New Zealand. Current CST projects include combining chair yoga with CST and adapting CST for Māori and Pacific people. He is a member of the Auckland Dementia Prevention Research Clinic, a longitudinal study of mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimers disease. Dr Cheung is an interRAI associate fellow and a member of the interRAI Network of Mental Health. In 2018, he was awarded the Sir John Logan Campbell Medical Fellowship to complete an interRAI project on late-life suicide risk assessment with the University of Waterloo, Canada, and the University of Hong Kong. He is a member of the Ministry of Health’s Support and Consultation for End of Life in New Zealand group (SCENZ). Dr Cheung was awarded the 2021 Alzheimers New Zealand Fellowship.

Dr Makarena Dudley (Te Rarawa, Ngāti Kahu) is a clinical neuropsychologist who has spent the past 10 years focusing on mate wareware in kaumātua Māori. Her team has developed the Māori focused MANA testing tool for diagnosing mate wareware, and amended Cognitive Stimulation Therapy (CST) for helping manage mate wareware. The MANA tool is due to launch later this year, while the CST workshop and manual are accessible now. Dudley is a senior lecturer at the University Auckland and a recipient of the 2020 Alzheimers NZ Research Fellowship.