Center for Outcomes & Measurement

Leadership

Mary Jane "MJ" Mulcahey, PhD, OTR/L, CPPC, CLCP, FASIA Professor, Department of Occupational Therapy
Professor, Department of Rehabilitation Medicine, Sidney Kimmel Medical College
Director, Center for Outcomes and Measurement
Interim Associate Dean of Research
215-503-2888

Faculty

Feroze Mohamed, PhD, MS Director, MR Physics
Department of Radiology, SKMC
215-955-3405

Catherine Verrier Piersol, PhD, OTR/L, FAOTA Professor, Department of Occupational Therapy
Chair, Department of Occupational Therapy
Director, Jefferson Elder Care
215-503-9509

Marie-Christine Potvin, PhD, OTR/L Professor
Director, Post-Professional Occupational Therapy Doctorate
215-951-2648

Collaborating Investigators

Philippa Campbell is an Occupational Therapist who was formerly Professor, Occupational Therapy Department, Jefferson College of Rehabilitation Sciences and currently serves as a collaborator within the Center for Outcomes and Measurement.  She is self-employed and provides consultation and contract services to a number of states, colleges, universities, and public health corporations with an emphasis on inclusion, early intervention for high need infants, toddlers, and preschoolers, and family-centered intervention approaches.  Over a more than 30-year career, Dr. Campbell has conducted numerous studies and published articles and books related to teaching (e.g., coaching) families, participation and inclusion of children in home, school, and community settings, and use of adaptation and assistive technology interventions with a special emphasis on children with significant and complex needs. 

Winnie (Winifred) Dunn, PhD is an Occupational Therapist and Distinguished Professor in the Department of Occupational Therapy at the University of Missouri.  Dr. Dunn has several areas of expertise including mentoring young interdisciplinary scientists, translating research findings for clinical practice, clinical practice and research using telerehabilitation and coaching interventions, fidelity of interventional methods and sensory processing.  She has extensive experience developing, testing, standardizing, and disseminating outcome measures for research and practice.  Dr. Dunn’s studies included children and adults with various conditions and the general population. Dr. Dunn served on the Steering Committee for the NIH Toolbox for Neurological and Behavioral Assessment where she was responsible for reviewing and critiquing all the assessments that were accepted and rejected for the NIH Toolbox. Dr. Dunn was also in charge of the somatosensory testing protocols studies and conducted the first studies of somatosensory responses in the general population for people ages 3 to 90 years. The studies took place across 7 sites internationally and provided the first standards for somatosensory responses in community dwelling members. The most prominent assessments Dr. Dunn has produced are the Sensory Profiles which are currently in their second editions and have been nationally and internationally standardized and have been translated into dozens of languages. They have been validated with many populations and have been used in large-scale research programs and in occupational therapy practice.

Linda Jones, PhD, PT, has been working in spinal cord injury for over 20 years.  After focusing on physical therapy interventions in the intensive care unit, she managed the first cell based trial in spinal cord injury followed by the first study utilizing cells derived from embryonic stem cells in the United States.  She subsequently joined the Craig H. Neilsen Foundation, managing the translational research portfolio, as well as initiating and overseeing special projects.  She is a member of the Spinal Cord Injury Outcomes Partnership Endeavor, the Chair of the Research Committee of the American Spinal Injury Association, and has served on the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, Common Data Elements for Spinal Cord Injury Committee.  Her interests lie in clinical trial design, outcome measures and bridging gaps between pre-clinical and clinical research. Currently, she is leading an effort to better understand the gaps between animal and human outcome measures.  

Mary Slavin, PhD is a Physical Therapist and Director of Education and Dissemination at the Health Outcomes Unit of Boston University School of Public Health.  Dr. Slavin has several areas of expertise including the development testing and dissemination of state-of-the-art measures to assess rehabilitation outcomes.  Dr. Slavin has been directly involved in developing the following measures: Activity Measure for Post-Acute Care (AM-PAC), currently used nationally in acute care hospitals and rehabilitation settings (e.g., Johns Hopkins, Cleveland Clinic); Spinal Cord Injury Functional Index (SCI-FI), currently used as an outcome measure for the Spinal Cord Injury Model Systems Outcomes Database; Pediatric Spinal Cord Injury Activity Measures (PEDI-SCI AM) and Measure of Participation (Pedi-SCI PMoP); Cerebral Palsy Profile (CP-PRO), which will be incorporated as an outcome measure for the national Cerebral Palsy Research Network; Life Impact Burn Injury Recovery Evaluation (LIBRE) Profile, which is currently used in a study supported by the Burn Injury Model Systems Programs; and the Work Disability Functional Assessment Battery (WD-FAB), developed for use as part of the Social Security Administration (SSA) disability determination process. Her involvement in developing and disseminating these measures includes the following activities: conduct focus group sessions and analyze discussions to identify relevant item content; develop training materials and conduct training to support calibration study data collection; organize item content for IRT analyses; review factor analyses to identify domain structure; examine IRT and differential item function analyses to determine item banks content; use item maps to identify different ability levels with cut points and narrative descriptions; work with programmers to develop and test CAT programs; meet with potential end users to develop meaningful score reports and identify implementation strategies; and develop training materials (e.g., user manuals, certification materials) and conduct training activities for end users (e.g., on-site training, webinars, user-focused conferences).