SHRS Blog

The University of Pittsburgh is one of seven institutions awarded funding through the distribution of $5.7 million in research grants from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD. The University’s Schools of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences (SHRS), Public Health and Engineering, and community partners Women for a Healthy Environment (WHE) and the Allegheny County Area Agency on Aging (AAA), received a grant of $918,709 to reduce environmental hazards in residential settings to allow more people to age safely in their homes.

For students interested in graduate studies in sports science at Pitt, Proessl is in a perfect position to remark on the strengths of the program as well as to make the distinction between the master’s and PhD programs. The Master’s in Sports Science (MSSS) program was just being developed as he worked on his PhD. Proessl watched it grow into the European model he had envisioned for himself as a master’s student years before. Now “It’s a one-of-a-kind program,” he says. “Pitt SHRS is in a very unique position. It’s one of the few schools with a master’s degree in Sports Science. The MS has a one-year internship with a team or lab of interest, which is very special in the U.S., it’s something I never had a chance to get. I had to create my own program. It’s the same model as in Europe. If you want to be a sports scientist, the practical experience can’t be underestimated.” 

As an assistant professor and researcher of Health Informatics in the Department of Health Information Management at the University of Pittsburgh School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, I am leading our efforts at the Pitt HexAI Research Laboratory. I am passionate about improving health care. ...

Three SHRS faculty assumed new leadership roles effective October 1. Tom Platt, professor and associate dean for Academic Partnerships, is now chair of the school’s Department of Community Health Services and Rehabilitation Science (CHSRS). ...

On Friday, September 16, the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences (SHRS) was finally able to come together to celebrate its 50th anniversary of academic excellence at the University of Pittsburgh and to recognize distinguished SHRS alumni on their career achievements. ...

Andrew Sprague, assistant professor in the Department of Physical Therapy, was recently awarded $645,053 by the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases for a five-year project titled, “Graft harvest as a model of tendon injury: Trajectory of recovery and clinical outcomes.” Below, he explains the study and its importance to future tendon injury patients. ...

This past December, Kelsey Watters crossed the stage as one of the first graduates of the University of Pittsburgh’s online Doctor of Clinical Science in Occupational Therapy (CScD) program --a program that began strategizing her success years ago.

“My hope is to educate and prepare our students not for the day they graduate, but for the next 50 years of their practice. Thus, we need to teach our students to think beyond our borders and be leaders on a global stage,” expresses Dipu Patel, a board-certified physician assistant who joins the University of Pittsburgh Physician Assistant Studies Department as its first professor and vice chair for Innovation.

Tails were wagging in the hallways of Bakery Square as special guests from My Pet’s Brace came for the day to teach our Master of Science in Prosthetics and Orthotics (MSPO) students about creating leg braces and prosthetics for animals. In the morning, these University of Pittsburgh School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences (SHRS) students listened to a lecture from the business’ founder, Jim Alaimo, about the fundamentals of this specialized profession. ...

Are you ready to break into the field of occupational therapy and become an occupational therapist or are you a practicing occupational therapist (OT) looking to develop advanced skills in practice, implementation or research?  

In the Department of Occupational Therapy at the University of Pittsburgh School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences (SHRS), we offer four great programs. Often, prospective students are not sure which program is right for them, or where their skills and goals fit best. This information will help you find the Pitt OT program that aligns most closely with your career path.

I studied computer science at universities in China and South Korea, but it wasn’t until I came to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota for my post-doc in 2015 that I discovered the next generation of data science was in medicine. It was also around that time that the size of data in medicine increased exponentially in the United States because it became more common for hospitals to use electronic health records. At the Mayo Clinic, I saw that the medical data was so large and underutilized that I decided to do my post-doc in the interdisciplinary field of data science and medicine. That was where I started to apply data science, natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques on the large volumes of data collected at the Mayo Clinic hospital.

Laura Abels graduated from the Spring 2022 APP course and is the Advanced Practice Education Coordinator at Akron Children's Hospital in Akron, Ohio. Read more about her experience in the program.