Prologue to the Forum: Honoring the Legacy of Michelle Bourgeois Through Person-Centered Dementia Care

In this prologue, we introduce readers to the Forum: Honoring the Legacy of Michelle Bourgeois Through Person-Centered Dementia Care. Michelle Bourgeois's scholarship challenged long-standing assumptions that little could be done to support communication with persons living with dementia. Her work was instrumental in establishing person-centered approaches that prioritize communication, participation, meaningful connection, and caregiver support across the trajectory of neurodegenerative diseases that cause dementia. The goal of this forum is to highlight clinically relevant, translational contributions that extend Bourgeois's legacy and to support clinicians in applying person-centered dementia care in real-world settings. The forum comprises five articles published across the June and August 2026 issues of Perspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups . Together, these articles include a clinician-authored tutorial on building a reminiscence therapy program from research evidence, a preliminary validation study of a care partner-reported measure of conversation difficulties and their impacts in primary progressive aphasia, a case study of speech-language therapy intervention in dementia care, an outcome study of external strategy group treatment for people with Parkinson's disease, and an outcomes report of an interdisciplinary cognitive screening workshop for preservice clinicians.