Biography

Mikael Anne Greenwood-Hickman, MPH, brings a mixed methods approach to geriatrics and aging research. Through the application of both quantitative and qualitative methods, her work aims to better understand the lives and behavior of older adults in order to build interventions and tools to preserve cognitive and physical function and promote wellbeing.

Since completing her Master of Public Health in epidemiology at the University of Washington in 2014, Ms. Greenwood-Hickman has served in several roles within public health research teams, including as a data manager and programmer, and as a project coordinator. She joined KPWHRI as a project manager for the Statistical Coordinating Center of the Breast Cancer Surveillance Consortium in 2017. In 2021, Ms. Greenwood-Hickman formally joined the KPWHRI faculty as a collaborative scientist, bringing her operational knowledge and management skills to bear on her scientific portfolio.

Ms. Greenwood-Hickman’s research interests and work are primarily focused on understanding physical activity and sedentary behavior patterns among older adults and developing and testing interventions to promote physical activity and reduce sedentary time. She has been an active collaborator on the Adult Changes in Thought Study’s Activity Monitoring sub-study since 2018. As part of this work, she is actively engaged in several ongoing analyses linking data gathered by accelerometers (activity trackers that electronically detect up-and-down, side-to-side, and back-and-forth motion) to cognitive and physical function outcomes in later life. She is also an active collaborator in the ongoing Health Aging Resources to Thrive (HART) trial, which is testing a sedentary behavior intervention for older adults with obesity.

Outside her work in physical activity, Ms. Greenwood-Hickman is also collaborating on a pragmatic trial testing a low-cost detection tool for undiagnosed dementia — the EHR Risk of Alzheimer's and Dementia Assessment Rule (eRADAR) algorithm — in clinical practice. She will be an integral part of the study’s planned qualitative evaluation of the eRADAR intervention approach and will strive to understand the intervention’s impact on patients, their care partners, and their clinical providers.