Dr Angela Rong Yang Zhang is a sociocultural and medical anthropologist and health services researcher whose work sits at the intersection of aged care, dementia care, palliative and end-of-life care, digital health and consumer- and community-led innovation. She is a Research Fellow at the Research Centre for Palliative Care, Death and Dying (RePaDD) and a Technical Professional in the College of Medicine and Public Health at Flinders University.

Angela’s research programme examines how care is organised and lived in residential aged care, home-based care and palliative care settings, with a particular focus on bodily realities, mobility, institutional life and everyday care practices. Her monograph At Home in a Nursing Home: An Ethnography on Movement and Care in Australia (Berghahn Books, 2023) builds on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with residents, families and staff in Adelaide-based facilities, and informs her ongoing work on risk, restriction, feeding, creative ageing and the meaning of “home” in long-term care.

A major current focus is the integration of artificial intelligence and digital health into palliative and aged care. As a recipient of the 2025 AI for Research Scheme at Flinders University, Angela is leading the development of AI-powered health communication tools for the national digital platforms Palliative Care Connect and CareSearch.

Angela is also strongly committed to consumer and community involvement. Supported by a 2025 Caring Futures Institute Lived Experience Involvement Microgrant, she is establishing an Inclusive Innovation Advisory Group and Lived Experience Expert Panel to guide AI-enabled and data-driven interventions in home-based aged care, disability support and palliative care. Across her projects, she combines ethnography, multimodal qualitative methods, co-design and lived-experience partnerships to generate research that is theoretically robust, methodologically rigorous and directly relevant to practice, policy and system reform.

Angela’s research interests lie at the intersection of anthropology, aged care, palliative care and digital health. She is particularly interested in:

• Everyday life in aged care and palliative care
  Experiences of residents, families and staff in residential aged care, home-based care and community palliative care; how “home”, safety, risk, autonomy and dignity are negotiated in long-term care and at the end of life.

• Dementia care and carer support
  Lived experiences of people living with dementia and their family carers; pathways into and through services; culturally responsive and equity-oriented approaches to information, support and decision-making.

• Digital health, AI and communication in serious illness
  AI-enabled health communication tools, digital platforms and decision-support resources (e.g. Palliative Care Connect, CareSearch); how language models and other digital tools can support explanation, navigation and sense-making for carers, patients and clinicians, particularly in rural, CALD and digitally marginalised communities.

• Consumer and community involvement and inclusive innovation
  Lived-experience-led research, co-design and governance of digital and data-driven interventions; development of advisory and expert panels (e.g. the Inclusive Innovation Advisory Group) to guide responsible and culturally safe innovation in aged, disability and palliative care.

• Creative ageing and community arts
  Community arts and creative practices as ways of supporting connection, visibility and wellbeing for older women and other groups; creative and narrative methods as research tools and as forms of knowledge translation.

• Cross-cultural and transnational perspectives on ageing and care
  Comparative work across Australian and Chinese contexts and with culturally and linguistically diverse communities, focusing on how ageing, illness, care and death are understood and practised in different cultural and policy settings.

Across these interests, Angela aims to integrate ethnographic and qualitative insight with digital innovation and lived experience to inform practice, policy and system reform in aged care, dementia care and palliative and end-of-life care.