Dr Simone de Bruin
Dr Simone de Bruin is professor of Living well with Dementia. She specializes in research on elderly care and dementia care.
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Research focus
She works on innovations that support living well with dementia, including care farms and other forms of green day activities. Key elements in her work include nature, everyday life, and enabling people to make a meaningful contribution. Her other research themes focus on creating a more nuanced image of dementia, as well as improving collaboration and coordination in dementia care and support.
She aims to strengthen the connection between research, practice, and education to facilitate the implementation of innovations in dementia care. Simone collaborates closely with citizens, healthcare and social professionals, students, and lecturers. She also has extensive experience coordinating multidisciplinary research consortia (e.g. Enable-dem, SUSTAIN), and is one of the coordinators of the Dutch network of dementia professors (PRODEM). On behalf of the universities of applied sciences, she is also a member of Mission Team IV (“improving quality of life for people with dementia”) of Health Holland.
Education
Simone studied Household and Consumer Sciences at Wageningen University and graduated cum laude in 2001.
Research Experience
After her studies, Simone worked as a researcher at TNO Quality of Life in Leiden. From 2005 to 2009, she worked at Wageningen University & Research on her doctoral research on daytime activities at care farms as an innovative form of care for people with dementia. She then worked as a senior researcher at the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) and as a guest researcher at Wageningen University & Research until 2020. There, she worked on various projects in the fields of elderly care and dementia care.
Since 2021, through practice-oriented research, she has been dedicated to improving life with dementia at Windesheim University of Applied Sciences.