Claudia Dressel

I'm here at Eastern Michigan University where I'm an associate professor.

I train people.

I do research in that area.

And for over 20 years, I have worked with families where one person has cognitive decline.

I kind of want to tell my origin story here, too.

And she told me that I didn't need to do much, that the person with a neurodegenerative disease had basically stopped speaking.

And I come from a little village in Germany.

You hear my accent.

And I had always lived with my grandparents and many of my peers also really had close ties with their grandparents.

So I had seen older adults of all ability levels, really.

And I thought, you know, I can do this.

I can be in the senior center and sit with this person.

And while we were sitting there, somebody switched on music and a boombox.

They started line dancing.

And suddenly I hear this voice next to me that says, this is all a bunch of crap.

And I thought, wow, you know, he can he can speak.

And I took him into a quiet area and he told me a lot about his life.

And I thought this was quite amazing because he was somebody who was described to me as nonverbal and hardly speaking.

And so ever since then, really...

I've worked with people with cognitive impairment to try to find out how to best support them and their caregivers in terms of communication and relationships.