Advanced Master students, PhD candidates/students and postdoctoral affiliates from a variety of complementary research fields are welcome to take part in this Summer School and contribute to the emergence of innovative, shared knowledge about what it means to “age well” worldwide. In addition to the 3 ECTS credited with the Summer School, participants gathered in international teams will have the opportunity to :

• conduct shared field research on a chosen challenge, leading to the co-creation (hand in hand with seniors) of innovative research questions and insights;

• share local perspectives, local policies, data and best practices about what it means to “grow old” in different european areas;

• freely access a GeroUNIC-MOOC and its exclusive teaching contents about individual aging in changing societies, functional ability of older adults, comprehensive restorative care and Multi-professional cooperation in supporting successful aging. Participants will receive accreditation for following this MOOC;

• take part to exciting lectures provided by academic leaders joining from diverse countries;

• collaboratively work the team challenges bearing in mind each participant’s own research path, and network towards international scientific collaboration (including opportunities for later international internships; post-doctoral stays; co-authorship of a conference paper,...).

Admitted participants will receive Mobility Grants to cover the Summer School expenses. For more information, please refer to the “Admission” section below.

Sunday, Sept. 17

• Pre-registration & Welcome

Monday, Sept. 18

• Registration
• Keynote sessions
• Poster and Pecha Kucha sessions to get to know each other, including reward for Best Presentation
• Social Event

Tuesday, Sept. 19

• Challenges’ presentations and teams’ composition
• Guest Lecture by Prof. Kilkey: “Creative Methodologies to collect data about Aging”
• Coaching sessions for each team and preparation of field work

Wednesday, Sept. 20

• Inspiring Talks session
• Team work: Walking sessions with the elderly & data collection
• Social Event

Thursday, Sept. 21

• Team work: making sense of field data
• Additional Q&A with senior representatives
• Team work: Co-creation of a research strategy

Friday, Sept. 22

• Social Event: Belgian culture
• Team work: preparing the final pitches
• Blended event: opportunities for international experiences

Saturday, Sept. 23

• Social Gathering: See you soon event

In researching aging, including with older people themselves, creative methods can enable researchers to decentre their approach, ensure wider inclusion of participants than a traditional interview method might allow, challenge spoken and written English as the dominant means of generating knowledge, elicit data on sensitive research topics and enhance participants’ ability to express their own interpretations of the world. In this lecture titled “Creative methodologies to collect data about aging”, I will introduce different examples of creative methods, drawing on my own experiences of researching with older people with a migration background. These include methods such as go-alongs, photovoice, arts-based methods and the ‘river of life’ drawing/painting method.
Professor Majella Kilkey is a qualitative researcher at the University of Sheffield working at the intersection of migration, family and care studies, including a focus on life-course dynamics. She researches with groups traditionally seen as marginalised, excluded and/or disadvantaged, including older people with a migration background. Her research is grounded in partnership working, and she uses creative and participatory approaches to research lived experience with the aims of engendering inclusion, respect and esteem. She is co-investigator in the Centre for Care, leading a program of work on Borders and Care and principal investigator in Storying Life Courses for Intersectional Inclusion.

The lecture will focus on healthy, active and successful aging in modern digital society from the perspective of health sciences. The keynote will emphasize individuality and address issues of maintaining functional ability and independence despite illness and disability. The lecture will also introduce a concept of restorative care as means to maintain and restore function of older adults. 

In contemporary society, the older population is visibly becoming more diverse. The proportion of older adults with a migration background is increasing and more older people are ‘coming out of the closet’. Both migrant and LGBT older adults are socially vulnerable: studies repeatedly show that they are more likely to experience loneliness. To tackle loneliness among these groups, knowledge of the causes is essential. After all, tailored interventions can only be designed if the causes are known. Therefore, the lecture starts with an overview of the main risk factors for loneliness among migrant and LGBT older adults. It will then transfer that knowledge into practice, which strategies can be suitable and effective in addressing loneliness.

The Lecture will focus on the role of the environment through the life-Course in enhancing or hindering healthy aging. The keynote will introduce and discuss the recent theories in life-course epidemiology. We will take some examples from the literature to understand the role of early life exposure in predicting the risk of  aging prematurely. We will then discuss together the methods to implement life-course theories in co-creating life-course prevention of aging.  

The Lecture will provide an overview of how Memory, Memory cultures and Memory studies can leverage well-being for older citizens in postindustrial regions. In an age of rapid globalization, which tends to manifest itself on an economic and political level, bridging the gap between historical theory and the study of historical memory helps making sense of current and located cultural practices and ways of “growing old”.

In the contexts of digitization, older people are often considered late adopters. Still, during the last decade various digital products and digitally supported services specifically designed for older people have been developed. The lecture critically summarizes the debate on digital technologies for aging societies and provides insights into recent technological but also theoretical developments in the field.

The Industry 4.0 paradigm is applicable to health and even life. Therefore, Health 4.0 is the new framework in which to frame any technological solution that is sought to the challenges of society. In this new framework, artificial intelligence plays a key role combined with virtual and augmented reality, biofeedback, cybersecurity or 3D manufacturing among others. Within active and healthy aging, the role of 4.0 solutions are key to provide comprehensive services to our seniors to improve their quality of life and increase their autonomy. 

Together with our societies’ unprecedented demographic aging, our governments nowadays deal with the unprecedented challenge of providing adequate housing for 2.1 billion of 60+ years old people to come at the 2050 horizon. Facing that prospect, political and socio-economic leaders have chosen to support the “aging-in-house” strategy, for both economic and well-being reasons. Doing so, they are confronted to tree major challenges in terms of desirability, economic viability and territorial feasibility. The Lecture will discuss how these challenges may be answered, through lessons learned from international case studies

Visual impairment affects the aging population worldwide to the same extent as Alzheimer's disease; it is not a trivial matter  but an urgent one, affecting the functional capacity of older adults. In this challenge, you´ll have a unique experience of running errands and moving around the city with a sensory impairment (visual and/or hearing impairment). Based on your experience, how would you modify the built environment, the social attitudes and atmosphere of the city to make it more sensory impairment and age-friendly?  

Physical impairments and limited mobility can increasingly contribute to loneliness and social isolation in old age. In the group challenge "An app for loneliness intervention", you will have the opportunity to design a prototype for a digital application that counteracts this challenge. The app will help bring people together - also intergenerationally - and thus reduce loneliness in old age. Through this program, you will gain valuable experience in app development, user experience design, and project management while also contributing to a meaningful cause.

Migrant and LGBT older adults are among the minority groups. Protecting minorities is the hallmark of democracy, but what is the best way to do this in practice: paying more attention to their specific needs and wishes in generic provision, or setting up specific facilities for them?

Aging is associated with changes in cognitive functioning (memory, attention,...) that do not lead to functional impairment but can make life more difficult. Moreover, difficulties can vary from person to person and do not express in the same way for everyone, according to life experience. You will have to discuss with people/read what they report as difficulties, and propose activities/adaptations in the environment to help seniors to deal with situations they found the most difficult. 

How to investigate how old people connect their past memories to good living in the present? This challenge will tackle how today’s older persons have experienced – and still are experiencing – aging in postindustrial regions/cities, and particularly how postindustrial environments and trajectories influence aging. Through this Challenge, you will be invited to create innovative and participatory methods and tools to collect seniors’ memories, and make sense of how these memories can shape future-oriented initiatives.

What does it mean for a senior to visit a museum, especially in regard to recent evolutions in terms of digitally-supported scenographies ? Through this Challenge, you will conduct walking sessions with seniors’ representatives to better understand their museum experience, and draft recommendations to enhance this experience.

Shopping centers have profoundly re-shaped commercial experiences in most cities. How do seniors relate to this new way of shopping? What are the various dimensions of this leisure experience? How can evidence-based, data-driven research help draft recommendations to enhance this experience, and help understand how seniors eventually relate to traditional cities’ centers?

The circumstances in which we live, from the air we breathe, the built environment that surrounds us, to our lifestyle choices, all have fundamental impacts on our health. Therefore, we should not look at health as a consequence of individual events, but as a complex journey. This challenge will provide an opportunity to assess Liege as an urban living environment and to see if it provides a friendly or unfriendly living environment for healthy aging. Students will utilize a heatmap, which is a graphical representation of data that uses a system of color-coding to represent different values such as access to green spaces or a number of fast-food outlets. The data collection can include observations from the urban environment, interviewing the local citizens, and already collected data available online such as Google Maps or air pollution monitoring data. 

Prof. Begonya García-Zapirain Soto

I graduated in Communications Engineering, specializing in Telematics at the Basque Country University, Bilbao (Spain) in 1994. In 2004, I defended my doctoral thesis in the pathological speech digital processing field. After 3 years of working for ZIV Company, in 1997, I joined the University of Deusto faculty and I am now Full Professor in signal processing theory and electronics. I have been the head of the Telecommunication Department for 6 years starting in 2002. In 2001 I created the eVIDA research group (evida.deusto.es) at the University of Deusto, playing the role of lead researcher (PI). I have participated in more than 110 research projects on international, national and regional levels, published  more than 150 papers in international scientific ISI journals,  presented more than 160 papers in international and national  scientific conferences and supervised 14 doctoral thesis.  I received 5 research awards at national level.

Prof. Amaia Mendez

Amaia Mendez is professor of engineering at the University of Deusto, Bilbao, Spain. From 2017 she combines her activity as academic secretary at the Faculty of engineering with her research group as part of eVida group. Her research interests are focused on the analysis and processing of medical imaging, aging and quality of life, and in recent years on the study of the relationship between physical activity and health. In recent years, he has focused on the design and development of technological platforms /and mobile apps) for the collection, analysis and visualization of biological variables.

Prof. María Jesús Monteagudo

María Jesús Monteagudo is PhD in Leisure and Human Potential and professor at the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences of the University of Deusto. Researcher associated with the official team "Leisure, Culture and Tourism for social transformation" (Ref. IT 1457-22), currently attached to Deusto Cities Lab of the same entity. As researcher, her main interest line revolves around leisure from a psychosocial approach, benefits and barriers to leisure, leisure during the life cycle, cities and public spaces, place attachment through leisure. Other topics she is interested in are related to gender perspective, wellbeing and aging and sustainable human and urban development.

Prof. Dr. Sebastian Merkel

Sebastian Merkel holds the Junior Professorship for Health and E-Health at the Faculty of Social Sciences at Ruhr University Bochum. The junior professorship analyzes the impact of digitalization on the health sector. The focus is on questions of how (digital) technology can be developed and designed in a participatory manner and what factors affect the appropriation, implementation, and diffusion  of digital technologies. He combines theories and methods from multiples disciplines, including sociology, public health, gerontology, and economics.

Prof. Dr. Stefan Berger

Stefan Berger is the Director of the Institute for Social Movements, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, and Chairman of the committee of the Library of the Ruhr Foundation. He is Professor of Social History at the Ruhr University. He specializes in nationalism and national identity studies, historiography and historical theory, comparative labour studies, and the history of industrial heritage.

Henrike Langer, M.A.

Henrike Langer is a research associate at the Junior Professorship for Health and E-Health of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Ruhr University Bochum. After studying gerontology (M.A.) at the University of Vechta and the TU Dortmund University, she was employed in various projects at the InWIS Institute in Bochum and the Dortmund University of Applied Sciences. Her research focuses on the digitalization of the health sector, participatory technology development and design, and demography and care in the neighborhood.

Prof. Sylvain Sebert

Sylvain Sebert is a Professor of Life-course Epidemiology from University Of Oulu, Finland. Sylvain has been involved as a researcher and principal investigator in multiple European projects to study the life-course trajectory of ageing related to the epidemic of obesity and associated metabolic study. His skills combine biological and social sciences to study the bio-psychosocial and environmental dimension of health and ageing. He leads the multidisciplinary and multicultural research group of life-course epidemiology which studies the origins and life-course trajectories of cardio-metabolic diseases and chronic multi-morbidities.

Miia Halonen

Miia Halonen is a Doctoral Researcher and University Teacher from University of Oulu, Finland. Her background is in public and global health and currently she is involved in European research project LongITools which studies the interactions between environmental, lifestyle and biological factors to determine the risks of chronic cardiovascular and metabolic diseases. Her research focuses on the risk of type 2 diabetes.

Heidi Siira

Heidi Siira is university lecturer and post-doctoral researcher in the field of nursing science from University of Oulu, Finland.  In her research, Heidi is combining her background and key competence areas in gerontology, rehabilitation, and disability. She wants to conduct and promote working-life-oriented research that is effective and meaningful for society and health care practices. Her research interests lie in overall wellbeing, quality of life and restorative care of older adults as well as in disability, (especially sensory impairment) in old age and rehabilitation. Before her academic career, Heidi worked many years with older adults in different sectors of social and healthcare.

Prof. Tineke Fokkema

Tineke Fokkema is a senior researcher at the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI-KNAW) and endowed professor Ageing, Families and Migration at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. Within IMISCOE, Europe’s largest academic network in the area of migration and integration, she is also coordinator of the Standing Committee ‘Older Migrants’ since 2014. Fokkema is an internationally regarded specialist on ageing, intergenerational solidarity, loneliness, migration, and their intersection. In her work, quantitative as well as qualitative data and methods are used.

Prof. Catherine Elsen

Catherine Elsen is Professor at University of Liège where she teaches architectural studios as well as user-centered & participatory methods and processes to students enrolled in the architectural engineering curriculum. She received her PhD in Engineering Sciences in 2011 (ULiege), a Master in Social Sciences in 2009 (CNAM, Paris), and a MS degree in Architecture and Building Engineering in 2007 (ULiege). Her research interests cover design processes (in architecture and industrial design), and more specifically the impact design tools and methods have on aging-well processes.

Prof. Fabienne Collette

Fabienne Collette is Research Director (F.R.S.-FNRS) at the University of Liège where she obtained her PhD in Psychology in 1998. One of her main research topics consist  in an integrative approach to disentangle factors leading to successful or pathological cognitive aging, ranging from biology (e.g. structural and functional brain changes; sleep characteristics) to daily life (e.g. the effect of physical activity or meditation practice).

If you are among the selected participants, you will receive further information to access grants that will cover most of your costs when joining this Summer School.

What are you committing to when submitting your application?

If you are among the selected participants, you commit to the following:

• to take part to the whole Summer School week (from Sept. 18 to Sept. 22 at minimum). The Summer School is designed as a short Research-through-design project, which thus requires full commitment from the participants during those 5 days
• before the Summer School (during Summer): to follow the modules of the GeroUNIC online MOOC (more info will follow)
• to prepare a poster summarizing what it means to grow old in your own area (a template will follow; printing will be taken care of by University of Liège upfront)
• to prepare a 3 minutes pitch of your own scientific interest about Aging research (access to a “how to pitch” tutorial will be provided)
• after the Summer School: to take part in one follow-up video-conference to address post Summer School results.

What can you expect in return?

For this whole process (preparing the Summer School; taking part to the Summer School and to the post-School online activity), you will be granted an official enrollment document, stating that you received 3 (ECTS) credits for having succeeded an University of Liège advanced class.

Your own home university will then be approached to see how these 3 credits might fit into your personal program (Master program; doctoral training program and so on).

Application form is now closed.

You will find on the website of the University of Liege all the useful information for your future stay as an international student. Additional information and tips are also collected on visitezliege.be .

You will have only a few days to spend in Liège. Here are our suggestions to make your stay memorable. 

The city of Liège has undergone a major urban development recently. We invite you to discover some emblematic contemporary achievements starting from the iconic Guillemins train station. From there, you can walk to the Design Station (rue Paradis), the Finance Tower (avenue Blonden), the pedestrian bridge “la Belle Liégeoise” which will lead you to the Boverie Park and its recently renovated museum. For the more curious, you can also discover the street art in Liege.

The discovery of the historical heritage goes through the feet. We absolutely recommend that you stroll through the historic district along the rue hors château, climb the stairs of the Montagne de Bueren, enjoy the incredible panorama from the slopes of the citadel (Boulevard du 12e de Ligne) and go back down via rue Pierreuse. Another original way to discover the city is to take the river shuttle.

Liege is a city known for its night life. After your rich exchanges during the Summer School, you will be able to relax around a drink in the famous Carré district, rue de la Casquette or on Place du Marché where the sun still shines later in the afternoon. During the day, the city center is the ideal place to do some shopping or to discover the designer boutiques on rue Neuvice or Souverain-Pont.

[Photos: Canva]