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 following her studies in music, and it was her work in the community as a violinist that led her to think more seriously about the connective power of music and the inequities that shape access to it. Those early observations led Sarah to wonder whether music might be part of a broader conversation on health behaviors, which ultimately drew her to 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 explore 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 care partners 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.
McKiddy’s collaborative ethos is reflected in the project’s dissemination efforts as well. She is partnering with UW Ethnomusicology student Leo Freedman on a soundscape project that complements written and visual dissemination materials by allowing listeners to experience and re-experience the live music engagements for themselves like an aural scrapbook. She is also working with Sydney Horen from the UW School of Nursing Advancement team to create the community-partner-facing storytelling and design materials. The Memory Hub project brings this process-focused philosophy into 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 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 shaped by questions about how the arts intersect with individual and collective health, and by scientific inquiry into what the arts have long revealed about human experience.