Nicole DePasquale

Nicole DePasquale, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in Medicine in the Division of General Internal Medicine at the Duke University School of Medicine. She earned her PhD in Human Development and Family Studies from the Pennsylvania State University (2017), MSPH from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (2011), and BA in Communication with minors in Psychology and Sociology from Rutgers University (2010). Her research addresses questions about health, well-being, and multiple role management in the context of middle and late adulthood, with the ultimate aim of informing intervention efforts. She addresses these questions through two lines of research that utilize quantitative and qualitative methodology. One line examines the ways in which patients with chronic kidney disease and their family care partners work together to self-manage the disease and the impact dyadic self-management has on their health both as individuals and as a unit. The second line examines the work/nonwork interface of long-term care employees with family caregiving roles, or double- and triple-duty caregivers. Recent research includes patient-family discussions about living-donor kidney transplantation, decisional conflict regarding kidney failure treatment modalities, and the work and nonwork benefits of family-supportive supervisor behavior among double- and triple-duty caregiving men.

In April 2021, Dr. DePasquale received a K01 Career Development Award from NIA to fund her research project, “Supporting Patients and Care Partners to Manage Chronic Kidney Disease Together,” or The Shared Kidney Care Study. The Shared Kidney Care Study examine ways in which older adult-family care partner dyads appraise and manage CKD together and the impact dyadic management has on their health and well-being as individuals and as a whole. A year later, she became a 2022-2024 Pilot and Exploratory Studies Award (PESC) Scholar at the Duke Claude D. Pepper Older Americans Independence Center (Duke OAIC). The award, which begins on July 1, will fund her pilot study project, “Individual and Dyadic Factors Associated with Older Dialysis Patients’ Physical Resilience.” This pilot project serves as an add-on component to the Shared Kidney Care Study and expands the parent study’s existing strengths by adding a new and unique focus on physical resilience. It will examine how kidney failure dyads work together (or not) to maintain, regain, or optimize older patients’ physical function amid dialysis initiation and its negative downstream effects for patients and family care partners alike.

Dr. DePasquale is the recipient of the Springer Early Career Achievement Award in Research on Adult Development and Aging from Division 20: Adult Development & Aging of the American Psychological Association (APA). Prior to this, she secured a NIA-sponsored National Research Service Award (F31) to support her dissertation on the sleep implications of double- and triple-duty care, for which she received the Doctoral Dissertation Award in the Psychology of Aging from Division 20 of APA. She was also an NIA Butler-Williams Scholar. Since 2017, she has served in a leadership position for APA Division 20’s Early Career Task Force and was responsible for launching the Division’s Special Interest Groups (SIGs) initiative. Currently, she is assisting with projects on the NIA/NIH CARE IDEAS R01 study examining outcomes among persons with cognitive impairment and their family care partners.