New Postdoc on Board

The highlight of our March was having Jessica Jarvis join CPERL Chicago! She is a pediatric music therapist and newly minted rehabilitation scientist. She completed her doctoral training at UTMB where she learned skills in secondary analyses of large rehabilitation datasets in order to examine predictors of disability. Her dissertation, funded through a Jeane B. Kempner Predoctoral Fellowship, leveraged data from an R01 funded study (PI: Ottenbacher, Co-I: Graham) in order to examine the relationship between cognition and disability in a Hispanic older adult population.

Given her clinical background in PICU, she would like to apply her knowledge and skills to examine predictors of functional recovery in this population. As outlined in her mentorship plan, Jessica will be primarily engaged in secondary analyses of data that were recently collected as part of a multi-site longitudinal study involving critically ill children (PI: Choong, Co-I: Khetani). Jessica and Erin are helping us to complete one of several papers that are in progress, examining determinants of home participation change, as she ramps up to lead a set of studies focused on a subset of data specific to school reintegration within this population. She will also be building skills in technology-based primary data collection by assisting with management of ongoing projects in lab.

Jessica brings a terrific blend of intensity and warmth to her role in our lab. She has helped the team make exciting discoveries in her first month here, and we look forward to her many scholarly contributions over time. Stay tuned!