Work by a UW PhD candidate in Nursing Science has caught the attention of two of Seattle’s most prominent outlets. Sarah McKiddy, a PhD candidate in Nursing Science at the University of Washington, was featured by The Seattle Times and Seattle Met for her work bringing professional musicians to the Memory Hub, a First Hill community center serving people living with dementia and their care partners.
Bridging Two Worlds
McKiddy came to nursing from a musical background, having taught violin in private studios, youth orchestras, and public school programs across Idaho. It was there she first observed the inequities that would later shape her scholarly lens: students without working instruments, lessons dropped due to transportation barriers, and communities underserved by arts education. Those early observations, combined with a desire to work more directly with people in vulnerable settings, drew her toward nursing.
Her scholarly interests have since crystallized around cognitive health, aging, and music-based interventions, with particular attention to cognitive resilience, nostalgia, and the social and structural factors that shape dementia care.
The Research
McKiddy’s dissertation uses implementation science to examine how a performing arts organization and a dementia-specific community center can partner to co-design music-based programming, with professional musicians working alongside people living with memory loss and their caregivers from the ground up. According to her profile on the UW Memory and Brain Wellness Center website, her work explores how creative practices such as music can be infused into community and clinical settings to help sustain or reshape a sense of self and well-being across the lifespan.
The Memory Hub project reflects that focus in practice. By bringing professional musicians into a dementia-specific center and studying how that collaboration unfolds, McKiddy is building an evidence base for cross-sector partnerships that could inform how arts and healthcare systems work together far beyond Seattle.
A Growing Voice in Healthy Aging
McKiddy’s faculty mentor is Dr. Basia Belza, and she is a former de Tornyay Center for Healthy Aging pre-doctoral scholar. She has been building toward this work since her undergraduate nursing studies, when she led an early literature review on music therapy and dementia, co-founded a chapter of the Youth Movement Against Alzheimer’s, and partnered with the Alzheimer’s Association Greater Idaho Chapter.
Her coverage in The Seattle Times and Seattle Met marks a meaningful moment of public recognition for research that is both rigorously academic and deeply community-rooted, a combination that has defined McKiddy’s trajectory from the start.