CPERL welcomes first PhD student

Our CPERL team has grown in an important way!  We are excited to announce the addition of Vera Kaelin, a PhD student in Rehabilitation Science at UIC. She joins us all the way from Switzerland, where she obtained her Masters in Occupational Therapy Science and worked as a research assistant, lecturer, and international coordinator at Zurich University of Applied Science.

As CPERL's first PhD student, Vera has not skipped a minute in settling in. She recently drafted her mentorship agreement to frame the focus of her work in her very first year of study that will help to expand our lab's contributions to participation-focused rehabilitation outcomes research and intervention development within habilitation service contexts (stay tuned).

While we anticipate that onboarding to research projects may take months, Vera has onboarded to lab culture in a matter of weeks. She is the inaugural recipient of our newly created lab handbook! As such, Vera has already identified several optimizations and is modeling teamwork by editing the handbook to benefit future team members.