Leslie C. Evertson is the Associate Director of Advanced Practice Providers at UCLA Health and a Dementia Care Specialist Nurse Practitioner in the Alzheimer’s and Dementia Care Program. Dr. Evertson’s career has focused on transforming care delivery for people living with dementia and their families. She developed the nurse practitioner Dementia Care Specialist (DCS) role at the Alzheimer’s and Dementia Care program, the most widely disseminated comprehensive dementia care model in the US. Demonstrated outcomes include reducing the severity of patients’ dementia-related behaviors, decreasing caregiver distress, strain, and depression, and reducing Medicare cost of care. She created the DCS training curriculum and spearheaded the partnership with the Gerontological Advanced Practice Nurses Association to train 500 nurse practitioners over 5 years. This work, supported by The John A. Hartford Foundation, led to implementation across 17 healthcare systems and influenced the Guiding an Improved Dementia Experience (GUIDE) Model, an alternative payment model for dementia care. She is also co-chair of the healthcare system intervention in the national pragmatic trial, The Dementia Care Study (D-CARE). Dr. Evertson holds a DNP from California State University Fresno, an MS from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, and a BS from California State University Sonoma.