ACES brings together leaders and partners across research, healthcare, policy, implementation, community engagement, advocacy, and lived experience around a shared goal: improving care, safety, and quality of life for older adults and the people who support them.
Our leadership works collaboratively across disciplines and sectors to strengthen partnerships, ask important questions, share what we learn, and help translate knowledge into practical improvements.
Dr. Lees Haggerty is a nationally recognized leader in aging services research and implementation whose work spans dementia care, caregiving, and elder safety.
Through ACES, Dr. Lees Haggerty and her colleagues are building on years of research, implementation, and partnership while creating new opportunities to connect work across disciplines and move evidence into real-world practice.
Her vision for ACES is grounded in a simple idea: research should not stop with what we learn. It should help change what we do.
Dr. Lees Haggerty, is an Assistant Professor of Gerontology at University of Massachusetts Boston where she directs the new Aging, Caregiving, and Elder Safety (ACES) Network.
Dr. Lees Haggerty's work focuses on strengthening health care systems to meet the needs of older adults through the design, testing, and dissemination of innovations that advance age-friendly health care.
Together with Dr. David Reuben of UCLA, she leads the National Dementia Care Collaboratory, a coalition devoted to improving access to evidence-based comprehensive dementia care nationwide, including through the CMS GUIDE Model.
Dr. Lees Haggerty is also principal investigator for the National Collaboratory to Address Elder Mistreatment, a coalition of researchers committed to improving elder mistreatment screening and response in health- and community-based systems. Dr. Lees Haggerty holds an NIH K-01 Career Development grant to investigate elder mistreatment among older adults with cognitive symptoms.
She earned her PhD in Population Health from Northeastern University and an MA in Applied Psychology from New York University and maintains an Adjunct faculty appointment at Weill Cornell Medical College.
Maria Avalos brings more than a decade of healthcare leadership spanning national aging initiatives, health system operations, quality improvement, and value-based care.
As Associate Director, she provides executive-level leadership for the National Dementia Care Collaborative and the National Collaboratory to Address Elder Mistreatment, translating research into practical strategies that strengthen care for older adults and their caregivers.
Her career includes healthcare consulting, health system operations, quality improvement, and value-based care. She has led multidisciplinary initiatives involving practice growth, financial and operational performance, patient access, regulatory compliance, and care transformation. Earlier roles in public health and aging services ground this work in community needs and the day-to-day experiences of older adults and caregivers.
Maria holds a Master of Public Health in Health Policy and Management from the University of South Florida. She is also a Project Management Professional and a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt.
Ruthann Froberg, MPA is a Senior Research Associate at the ACES Lab where her work focuses on supporting the National Collaboratory to Address Elder Mistreatment. Her primary areas of research include elder mistreatment screening practices, life course development, sexuality in older adulthood, and long-term care settings.
A published author, her work appears in journals such as Academic Emergency Medicine, Health Policy and Economics, Innovation in Aging, and International Journal of Psychiatry in Medicine. She is a regular presenter at the Gerontological Society of America Annual Scientific Meeting.
Ruthann is also a doctoral candidate at Virginia Tech and holds an MPA and Graduate Certificate in Gerontology from the University of Kentucky, as well as a BS in Chemistry and Public Health from Emory & Henry University.
Randi Campetti is a Research Associate with extensive experience in project coordination, technical assistance, and qualitative and quantitative research. Currently, she supports the implementation, evaluation, and dissemination of the National Collaboratory to Address Elder Mistreatment and co-leads a working group focused on mainstreaming elder mistreatment prevention and response into healthcare systems.
She also contributes to the Community Connections Roadmap Web Application, helping transition a static PDF into an interactive tool for emergency departments responding to elder mistreatment. In addition, she supports implementation planning for Michigan’s Elder Mistreatment Emergency Department Toolkit Initiative by developing data collection tools, conducting qualitative focus groups with emergency department clinicians, and analyzing data to inform Toolkit adaptation.
Through DETECT-RPC, she develops data collection tools, conducts interviews and focus groups with home-based primary care programs, and analyzes data to inform adaptation of an elder mistreatment screening tool.
Randi previously conducted research for the National Institute of Justice study Pathways to Safety: An Examination of Federal- and State-Level Barriers and Facilitators to Elder Abuse Reporting and Response and supported implementation and dissemination of the UCLA Alzheimer’s and Dementia Care Program.
She also supported development and pilot testing of an online EMS training on elder mistreatment and has co-authored peer-reviewed publications on elder mistreatment, dementia care dissemination, and evaluation.
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Together, we will continue advancing practical, evidence-informed approaches that support older adults, caregivers, healthcare professionals, and organizations.
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Advancing evidence into action for older adults, caregivers, and healthcare systems.
Advancing evidence into action for older adults, caregivers, and healthcare systems.
