Maria Is a trained psychologist from Aarhus University, and has worked with geriatric patients in both the psychiatric hospital and in care settings, supervising nurses, physical therapists and nursing home staff.
This experience sparked the idea for her PhD, where she is exploring how doctors make decisions about older adults in the emergency setting. She is especially interested in the development of expertise and the role of distributed cognition in teams, in training adaptive expertise. Her research is based on both qualitative and quantitative research methodologies, exploring decision-making as a cognitive phenomenon through ethnographic and statistical methods. Her work seeks to understand how (1) decision-making in medicine is theoretically conceptualized, (2) similarities and discrepancies between novice and expert doctors’ clinical decision-making competencies in geriatric emergency medicine, and (3) understanding geriatric emergency medicine training needs amongst young doctors.
