By Cristóbal Venegas.
On Tuesday, November 15th, the Center for Geroscience, Mental Health, and Metabolism (GERO) attended the MICARE offices to sign a joint research cooperation agreement.
GERO is a multidisciplinary research center, focused on brain diseases, which seeks to improve the quality of life of chilean older people through its work. It was represented by Christian González-Billault, Director of the institution, who personally signed the document; and also Andrea Slachevsky, Principal Investigator of GERO; and Consuelo Cruz, in charge of Management and Liaison of GERO.
For its part, from MICARE signed Claudia Miranda, our Director and academic of the Doctorate in Nursing Science UNAB. Alejandra Araya, MICARE associate researcher and academic of the Doctorate in Nursing Science UNAB; Javiera Gutiérrez, Executive Director of MICARE; and Raffaela Carvacho, MICARE Research Coordinator, also attended the meeting.
The agreement represents an important advance in research about older people, since it unites the area of social sciences, from MICARE, with a more biological approach, such as GERO’s. The meeting was an opportunity to share points and plan events, investigations and seminars, among others.
“The signing of this cooperation agreement seems valuable to me, because this issue, that both centers are dealing with, is really important to our country,” said Christián González-Billault at the conference. “We have to take charge in order to deliver tools to whom, later, have to legislate on older people”, he said.
MICARE Director Claudia Miranda also added: “When we think of care, we are always thinking of at least one dyad. It is extremely important to work together on these two communities: consider not only the older person but also the one who is caring for them or providing support. So having this agreement with GERO, which is studying bio-psychosocial factors in aging, I think will open up many opportunities to have a better understanding of this relationship in research.”
