Alexandra Lelia Dima

Alexandra Dima has a degree in Psychology from the University of Bucharest, Romania in 2000, a Master's degree in Psychotherapy and Psychodiagnosis from the same university in 2002. She has obtained a PhD in Clinical and Health Psychology from the School of Health in Social Sciences, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom, in 2010.

Between 2010 and 2012, she was a postdoctoral researcher in Primary Care and Population Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, University of Southampton, United Kingdom.

Between 2012 and 2017, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher on an European Commission-funded (FP7) project, first at the Department of Communication Science, University of Wageningen, then at the Amsterdam School for Communication Research (ASCoR), University of Amsterdam. The project investigated the safety of long-acting beta2-agonists in asthma in routine care, by combining healthcare databases and direct patient follow-up, with a focus on the role of patient and healthcare professional behaviours. During this project, and in collaboration with Prof. Dan Dediu (now at University of Barcelona), she developed AdhereR, an R package for computing and visualizing medication adherence from routine healthcare data.

In 2017, she received a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship to study collaborative self-management support in chronic conditions at the Health Services and Performance Research (HESPER) group, University Claude Bernard Lyon 1, France. The project initiated work on an interdisciplinary model of collaborative practices in this field and opened new research collaborations on medication adherence, health literacy, integrated care, health behaviour change and technology-supported interventions in chronic care. She continued her work in this group (newly INSERM U1290 RESHAPE), within an IDEXLyon Fellowship until December 2021.

Since 2020, she is a member of the Executive Committee of the International Society for Medication Adherence (ESPACOMP) which she joined in 2012; she was elected President of ESPACOMP for the year 2023. Since 2020, she has been appointed Chair of the "Medication Adherence Technologies" Work Package within the ENABLE European network to Advance Best Practices and Technology on Medication Adherence. She is also Associate Fellow and Chartered Member of the British Psyhological Society, member of the European Health Psychology Society, and of the French Association of Health Psychology.

In 2021, she received a Miguel Servet Fellowship and joined the PRISMA group in January 2022. From January to September 2023, she was Serra Húnter Lecturer in Behaviour Science Methodology in the Department of Social Psychology and Quantitative Psychology, University of Barcelona. She has continued her research within the PRISMA group and she is now back to her Senior Researcher role.

At present, her research programme at PRISMA focuses on using real-world data and expert consultation methods to develop new insights into chronic care, and developing, testing, and implementing technology-supported Health behaviour change interventions at patient, healthcare professional, and organization level. Her main areas of expertise are treatment decision-making, long-term treatment adherence and psycho-social adjustment to chronic conditions.

Since 2023, she is Principal Investigator on behalf of IRSJD as partner in the multinational consortium SALVOVAR, a Horizon Europe-funded project aiming to improve the management of patients with poor prognostic ovarian cancer after neoadjuvant chemotherapy. Within SALVOVAR, she leads the Work Package on determinants of treatment decision making in the context of therapeutic uncertainty from the perspectives of both patients and clinicians, with a view to integrated patient preferences in a shared decision-making process.