Dr. Dawn Mackey is passionate about helping older adults to maintain mobility and independence. In her Aging and Population Health Lab (APHL) at Simon Fraser University, Dr. Mackey and her team are focused on designing, evaluating, and implementing effective strategies to support older adult mobility and health behaviour change. Her current areas of concentration are physical activity, falls and injuries, and fatigability.

Dr. Mackey’s research with older adults spans community to long-term care settings. Her work is applied in nature and solutions focused. Her research is embedded in a knowledge exchange framework that supports translation of insights into actions. As such, she engages with stakeholders to design, conduct, and disseminate research to ensure impact.

Dr. Mackey received her BSc Honours and MSc in Kinesiology from Simon Fraser University. She received her PhD in Epidemiology from the University of California, Berkeley, and she continued her training in Epidemiology through a post-doctoral fellowship at the San Francisco Coordinating Centre at the University of California, San Francisco. Now as a faculty member, she is committed to providing outstanding mentorship to her trainees.

Dr. Mackey’s research incorporates methods and techniques from epidemiology, biostatistics, and knowledge translation. These include clinical trials, feasibility and proof-of-concept studies, longitudinal cohort studies, causal inference, laboratory experiments, qualitative inquiries, knowledge synthesis, meta-analysis, and formative evaluation.