Meet the speakers: What next for care work? A symposium on futures

Professor Linda McKie - Executive Dean, Faculty of Social Science & Public Policy

Linda McKie is Executive Dean for the Faculty of Social Science & Public Policy and Professor of Social and Public Policy in the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine at King’s College London.

Linda is Principal Investigator on the UKRI project “Healthier working lives and ageing for residential care workers: developing careers, enhancing continuity, promoting wellbeing” (£1.4 million). She is co-investigator on the UKRI project “Beyond the 10 000 steps: Managing less visible aspects of healthy ageing at work” (£1.9 million). Both projects run to February 2024 and are part of the Healthy Ageing programme.

Jonathan Slater - Visiting Professor

Following a 35 year career as a public servant, Jonathan has established a non-executive portfolio of academic, advisory and charitable work.

He is on the Board of the Institute for Government, the Advisory Council of the University of Cambridge Centre for Science and Policy, and the Council of the Federation of Education Development.Jonathan was Permanent Secretary of the Department for Education from 2016 to 2020, and head of the civil service policy profession.

Before that, he was the Head of the Economic and Domestic Secretariat, Director General Transformation at Justice and Defence, Chief Executive of the Office of Criminal Justice Reform, and Director of Performance and Improvement for Prisons and Probation.

Jonathan was originally a mathematician, working as an operational researcher for British Rail, before joining first Newham and then Islington Council, ending up as Deputy Chief Executive and Director of Education before joining the Cabinet Office in 2001. Here he worked on public service reform for Tony Blair and civil service reform for Gus O’Donnell.

Jakov Jandric - SHAW Project, University of Edinburgh

Jakov is the The Nick Oliver Lecturer in Organisational Behaviour at the University of Edinburgh Business School

Jakov’s research focuses on the interplay between institutions, organisations and individuals in the workplace. He is particularly interested in the relationship between age, health and employment and focus on finding better ways in which organisations can support workers over 50 who often experience age-related discrimination in the workplace.

He is involved in three projects: (1) UKRI Healthy Ageing Challenge funded project ‘Supporting Healthy Ageing at Work’, in which he is a Co-I and a core team member; (2) Collegiality in Contemporary Higher Education: the UK perspective; and (3) Voices of Graduating Students.

Within his work, Jakov engages with a range of organisations across the UK including Age Scotland, CIPD and BITC.

Michelle Dyson - Director General for Adult Social Care

Michelle Dyson is Director General for Social care at the Department of Health and Social Care for the UK Government.

Michelle is responsible for leading on matters relating to adult social care in the department and across Whitehall.

Previously, Michelle worked as a senior civil servant in roles across the Ministry of Justice, Department for Work and Pensions and Department for Education, with a focus on social policy and consideration of disadvantaged groups. She is a qualified solicitor and spent the first part of her Civil Service career as a government lawyer.

George MacGinnis - Director, Healthy Ageing Challenge

George MacGinnis is Challenge Director for Healthy Ageing at UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). He leads a £98 million research and innovation programme that supports people as they age, and also their carers. The programme includes funding for research into behavioural science and design for an ageing population, collaborative research and development projects for early-stage innovations and large-scale trials to show how innovations can work in real life.

George is experienced in leading health and care innovation programmes. In the past decade, he worked with a global industry alliance to enable a consumer-friendly market for digital wellness and health services. He holds master’s degrees from the University of Cambridge and King’s College London as well as an MBA from the Open University.

Steve McCreadie, CEO, The Lens

The Lens, an organisation that develops the talent and ideas in organisations to encourage innovation and improvements.

In 2022, Dumfries and Galloway Health and Social Care Partnership (DGHSCP) partnered with The Lens to deliver its first ever Intrapreneurship Programme: ‘Making the Leap with The Lens’.

Dumfries and Galloway Health and Social Care partnership are so confident in the impact achieved, they have committed to an intrapreneurship programme across the whole partnership, and included unpaid carers.

Nic Palmarini, Director, National Innovation Centre for Ageing (NICA)

Nic was previously Head of AI for Healthy Ageing at IBM Research and AI Ethics Lead and Research Manager at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, an academic-industry partnership for the responsible advancement of artificial intelligence.

He has deep expertise bridging disciplines in academic and industrial research with real-world applications to deliver for community and business, with particular focus on longevity and the coming effects and opportunities of the demographic revolution.

Nic served as Director of the IBM Human Centric Solution Centre in Paris, and holds a decade of experience in research on supporting older adults’ autonomy and independence, leading a global team to develop Human Activity Recognition techniques dedicated to older adults based on AI applied to IoT data.

Nic is also an author, teacher, applied research scientist and his main areas of research are loneliness as an accelerator of physical and cognitive diseases, ageism, ageing and economic factors, ethics and AI. The work done by his teams have twice been awarded the Computer Honours Award at the United Nations for Aging Initiative and received the Disability Matters – Market Place Award.

Annette Boaz, Director, Health and Social Care Workforce Research Unit

Annette joined King’s from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine where she was Professor of Health and Social Care Policy in the Department of Health Services Research and Policy.

She has more than 25 years of experience in supporting the use of evidence across a range of policy domains. She was part of one of the largest UK investments in the evidence use landscape, the ESRC Centre for Evidence Based Policy and Practice and a Founding Editor of the Journal Evidence & Policy. She has undertaken an international leadership role in promoting the use of evidence, recently publishing a new book on evidence use ‘What Works Now’ and co-leading Transforming Evidence with Kathryn Oliver.

Annette has a longstanding interest in supporting the use of research in the health and social care sectors and is currently leading an NIHR funded study setting up and evaluating innovative research practice partnerships between care homes and universities.