Training Activities

Graduate Assistants at Marquette University, the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee will be active members of the multi-disciplinary research and development teams of this RERC. The disciplines for the Research Assistantships include Biomedical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Occupational Science and Technology, and Interdisciplinary Health Sciences. These graduate assistantships provide the opportunity to train these graduate students to conduct disabilities studies that are interdisciplinary and cognizant of the cultural contexts of disability.

We currently have 6 graduate students working on R & D projects, 4 of which are currently funded by the grant. Early integration of the graduate assistants into the planning, implementation, and evaluation phases of the RERC research and development projects is extremely effective in forwarding the objects of the project and building a cadre of future rehabilitation researchers. This lesson was learned in the R1 Project (clubfoot tissue characterization) and the D3 Project (Bi-planer fluoroscopy).