Ithaca College

Faculty and students from the Occupational Therapy Department at Ithaca College presented four posters at the 91st Annual Conference of the American Occupational Therapy Department, held in Philadelphia from April 13-16, 2011.

 Julie Dorsey and Judith Gonyea, both Assistant Professors in Occupational Therapy, presented a poster with Cathy Haines, an occupational therapist at Schuyler Hospital in Montour Falls.   The poster, Developing Innovative Multi-Disciplinary Occupational Therapy Programming in the Community, described services that they have provided related to chronic pain and cardiac care to an underserved population in the Ithaca Free Clinic.

 Judith Gonyea also presented a poster entitled Clinical Reasoning as a Foundation for Systems Change: Integrating Program and Staff Development With Team-Oriented Fieldwork.  This poster highlighted a model for academic fieldwork education that is integrated with an interdisciplinary approach to evidence-based systems change. Application of this model across treatment settings and levels of care were presented. Rita Daly, Assistant Professor in Occupational Therapy, was a contributing author.

Carole Dennis, Associate Professor and Chair, presented a poster with graduate students Marissa Becker, Kelsey Baker, and Maribeth Hirschey entitled The WeeBot: Infant Use of a Robotic Mobility Device Using a Balance-board Control System. Their research demonstrated that children younger than 10 months of age were able to control their movement on a mobile robot by leaning their upper bodies. Graduate students Beth Davies and Laura Lemelin participated in the research as well, but were unable to attend the conference.

 Julie Ann Nastasi. Assistant Professor, presented a poster,  Developing Best-Practice Models for Fieldwork Education in Emerging Practice Areas, which summarized the development of a specialty Level II fieldwork program in low vision rehabilitation to be used as an example to guide practitioners in developing models for emerging practice areas.