CPERL team members featured by American OT Foundation

To our knowledge, we are the first, and hopefully not the last, research team at UIC to secure and deliver on multiple American Occupational Therapy Foundation (AOTF) grants, to advance the PEM suite for driving participation-focused services that both honor and empower families of young children experiencing disability. During our trip to Kansas City, MO for the American Occupational Therapy Association (AOTA) conference in April, we got invited to produce this video that shares the positive impact of AOTF investment on our ability to: 1) produce and build momentum for this area of science that has helped team members to attract subsequent federal funding (e.g., NIH, NIDILRR, AHRQ, and NSF); and 2) provide mentored research training opportunity for diverse and motivated occupational therapists to earn credit for their project contributions and thereby build momentum for their respective career paths.

Mary shares: "I got to surprise these team members with this video opportunity just moments after sitting together for the Slagle lecture, and hours before I would take the stage to become a Fellow of the AOTA that day. During our shoot, it was special for me to be able to share with them how far back I go with AOTF ... having first become an AOTF Habits Protege as a second-year doctoral student, then securing my first of two dissertation research awards from AOTF months before I defended my dissertation in 2010, and then earning AOTF pilot funding during two formative phases of my academic trajectory (pre and post-tenure). AOTF investment to light my career path over time has taught me that sponsoring relationships, like mentoring relationships, can be career-long (not term-limited)."