Sussany Beltran, PhD, MSW

Susanny Beltran, Ph.D. serves as an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Central Florida and Co-Director of the Center for Behavioral Health Research and Training. She holds a Ph.D. in Social Work from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and both a master’s degree in social work and bachelor’s degree in psychology from Florida International University. As a social worker with practice experience with older adults across the continuum of care (e.g., community waiver programs, assisted living, nursing homes), Dr. Beltran’s work aims to remove barriers to end-of-life care for underserved groups. Recent studies have described gaps and training needs to prepare the gerontology workforce for the aging and diversifying of the population; explored predictors of terminal agitation in hospice; Latino families’ expectations of hospice at enrollment; and predictors of nursing home-hospice collaboration. Currently, she is developing a care process to improve transitions to palliative and hospice care for nursing home residents with dementia, through a project funded by the Florida Department of Health. She leads the Central Florida Dementia Care and Cure Initiative taskforce, a group charged by the Florida Department of Elder Affairs to make communities more dementia friendly.