Dawn Mackey

Dr. Dawn Mackey is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Physiology and Kinesiology at Simon Fraser University and a Core Member of the UBC/VCHRI Centre for Hip Health and Mobility. She is passionate about helping older adults to maintain mobility and independence. In her Aging and Population Health Lab (APHL), Dr. Mackey and her team are focused on designing, evaluating, and implementing effective strategies to support older adult health, mobility, and behavior change. Her current areas of concentration are physical activity, falls and injuries, and fatigability.

Dr. Mackey's research is applied and clinical in nature, focused on solutions, team-based, and spans community to long-term care settings. Her work is embedded in a knowledge exchange framework that supports translation of insights into actions. As such, she engage with a range of stakeholders to design, conduct, and disseminate research to ensure impact.

Dr. Mackey’s research incorporates methods and techniques from epidemiology, biostatistics, and knowledge translation. These include clinical trials, feasibility and proof-of-concept studies, longitudinal cohort studies, causal inference, laboratory experiments, qualitative inquiries, knowledge synthesis, meta-analysis, and formative evaluation.

Dr. Mackey received her BSc Honours and MSc in Kinesiology from Simon Fraser University. She received her PhD in Epidemiology from the University of California, Berkeley, and she continued her training in Epidemiology through a post-doctoral fellowship at the San Francisco Coordinating Centre at the University of California, San Francisco. She has been recognized as an emerging scholar in aging by a 2011 CIHR Age+ Prize and a 2014 Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Scholar Award.