Wendy Wood

Wendy Wood is an Associate Professor in Occupational Science, Program in Occupational Therapy, in the Department of Allied Health Sciences at UNC-CH. Her major research interest lies in the study of dynamic interactions among social and physical features of diverse institutional environments and how residents of those environments spend their time, interact with others, express their inherent competencies, and experience a satisfactory quality of life on a daily basis. She has studied these interactions in captive nonhuman primates and, more recently, older adults with dementia. Her dementia research has specifically sought to explicate how institutional settings variously support or undermine residents' engagement in meaningful activities, supportive social interactions, and positive emotional experiences. She has recently become interested in comparisons between how people with dementia are cared for in the United States versus Scandinavia, particularly Denmark and Sweden.