Thea Franke, PhD
Dr. Thea Franke is a Research Associate with the Active Aging Research Team (AART) at the University of British Columbia (UBC) working with Drs. Heather McKay and Joanie Sims Gould. Thea holds an Honors B.A. Specialist in Sociology from the University of Toronto, a M.A. in Family Studies and Gerontology from Mount Saint Vincent University and a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies from UBC. Her PhD research focused on older adult’s physical activity and mobility within the built and social environment.
With AART, Thea designs and evaluates the implementation and scale up of health-promoting interventions across settings (e.g., long term care facilities to community recreation centres). Thea has a great deal of expertise in implementation science and employs qualitative and knowledge translation methodologies to improve the uptake and impact of evidence-based interventions in practice. Thea is skilled in building interdisciplinary teams and is responsible for the operational accounting (e.g., salaries, expensing, tracking and reporting) and grant compliance for all of AART’s team grants.