The Global Goals
In 2015, UN member states agreed to 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all. Tomasina's work contributes towards the following SDG(s):
About Tomasina
I am an applied health services researcher based at the Community and Primary Care Research Group. I work in the broad area of proactive, person-centred care for people living with dementia and other serious illnesses. My work aims to improve quality of life and care experiences through better communication and planning across the life course, particularly in contexts of uncertainty such as dementia.
I am experienced in a range of methods, gained from working in different research areas. These include linguistic analysis (speech, language and communication in schizophrenia), functional magnetic resonance imagine (neural correlates of bilingualism; impact of cognitive decline in neural function), realist evaluation (post-diagnostic dementia support) and realist economic evaluation (family-focused support for children in high deprivation areas). Currently, I hold an NIHR Dementia Capacity Building Fellowship, which has supported my transition to becoming an applied health services researcher. During this time I have developed my interests in (1) advance care planning and reducing unplanned or high-level care (e.g. hospitalisations) especially for conditions like dementia where trajectory is uncertain – made more complex by the presence of other long-term conditions; (2) person-centred palliative care across the life course, with a focus communication in serious illness; (3) how to deliver the best possible care in resource-limited settings; and (4) developing and enhancing ways of including people – including those who lack cognitive capacity and those from under-served communities – in all aspects of the research process.
From 2019 to 2024, I was Programme Lead for the NIHR-funded Dementia PersonAlised Care Team (D-PACT) project, which developed and evaluated a primary care-based model of dementia support.
Supervised Research Degrees
- Waine, H. Functional grammatical development in children with Developmental Language Disorder
- Lim Li Koon, Reading processes in biscriptal children in Singapore
- Masnidah Masnawi, Imageability and verb-noun naming in Aphasia: Can the effect of grammatical class be reduced to differences in imageability?
- Philina Ng, Fusiform gyrus: Investigation of visual word recognition in the bilingual brain
- Seng Su Lin, Bilingual language control and switching
Teaching
I have taught undergraduates and postgraduates in the following areas:
- Psycholinguistics/Advanced Psycholinguistics
- Child Language Acquisition
- Introduction to the Neurocognition of Language
- Introductory Linguistics
- Linguistics Frameworks (for Speech & Language Pathology)
- Bilingualism
