Principal Investigator

Dulce Cruz-Oliver has been an assistant professor of palliative care at Johns Hopkins University since 2017. Part of her motivation to become a doctor arose because, throughout the past 15 years working as a palliative geriatrician, she has seen poor-quality end-of-life care, especially for Latino elders and their families. This sparked her desire to foster a career with a focus on Latino caregivers. Her goal is to empower Latino family caregivers and health professionals in caring for seriously ill people by promoting innovative education and research.

Co-Investigator, Interventionist

Marcela Blinka is a research associate in the Division of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Her research focuses on identifying and understanding the needs and experiences of caregivers and care recipients of frail older adults, people living with dementia, and hospice family caregivers. The ultimate goal of this work is to develop and implement interventions to assist and support the caregivers of older adults, care recipients and healthcare providers.

Research Coordinator

Marielle Bugayong is the study’s research coordinator and works in the Division of General Internal Medicine (GIM) at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She holds a master’s degree in public health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Working with clinician educators and junior investigators across GIM and the Division of Hospital Medicine, Bugayong manages projects focusing on diabetes prevention, diabetes management, cancer survivorship, palliative medicine, hospice care and medical education.

Data Manager

Tony Pereira is a senior software engineer with the Johns Hopkins Center on Aging and Health.  He holds a master's degree in information technology and operations analysis from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.  His role is to work with researchers in assisting with the use of technology in their research projects.  Tony is also an adjunct faculty member with the Core for Clinical Research Data Acquisition (CCDA), assisting in the extraction and visualization of electronic medical record data from Epic.

Consultant

Debra Parker Oliver is a professor in the Division of Palliative Medicine at Washington University. She has a master's of social work and a Ph.D. in rural sociology from the University of Missouri. Before getting her doctorate, she was the founder of Hands of Hope Hospice in St. Joseph, Missouri, and served as a hospice director in two additional hospices for a total of more than 20 years. After earning her doctorate, she continued her commitment to improving hospice care through research. She has authored more than 200 peer-reviewed articles and several book chapters related to end-of-life and hospice care. She was the first non-physician member of the board of directors for the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine and an associate editor for the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management. Debbie’s research has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) since 2016. She has been the principal investigator for a total of 5 studies from three different NIH institutes (Aging, Nursing and Cancer).

Research Assistant

Sewar Kheir is a recent medical graduate from the University of Jordan. She worked with Dr. Cruz and the Johns Hopkins research team for two months using compassionate storytelling via novella videos to support hospice patients and caregivers. Sewar contributed by gathering and interpreting caregivers' voices, helping to shape a human-centered approach to end-of-life care. Since returning to Jordan, she has continued to contribute remotely. She is dedicated to advancing care that honors dignity, empathy and the human connection in medicine.

Research Assistant

Daniel Arteaga-Vargas is a bilingual physician and public health professional with a strong interest in community health education, oncology and palliative care. He earned his medical degree from Universidad Militar Nueva Granada in Bogotá, Colombia, and his master's in public health with a concentration in epidemiology and biostatistics from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Daniel has over six years of experience in clinical care and research, particularly serving underserved populations. He currently works as a community health educator in the Department of Oncology and as a research assistant on the hospice family caregivers research study at Johns Hopkins.