A farewell note from Dr. James Sulzer:
Dear CARE,
I am leaving UT in a month and it has been an honor working with you. I wanted to write this last letter to you as my way of expressing my gratitude to you and to say goodbye.
The idea of CARE came from my own experience as a grad student. Rehabilitation is too multidisciplinary to work on islands; it needs a community to create a nurturing environment for raising the next generation of rehabilitation engineers and scientists. It began with a conversation with two clinicians from Seton, Alex Valadka and Roger Parthasarthy in late 2013. We quickly expanded beyond Engineering-Seton ties to other schools and departments, with help from people like Maya Henry, Patrick Spicer, Theresa Jones, and Larry Abraham, whose contributions we recently honored. We started conversations, hosted speakers, launched CARE Research Day, performed a “traveling road show” for clinics, and launched a couple spin-off groups, too. Engineering provided the seed funding to get this all started.
It wasn’t until Linda Noble joined me as Co-Director, Deanna (Dee) Wallace Donovan became our Program Coordinator/ Executive Director and Billie Pierce joined as our Coordinator that we reached a new level. Since they joined us 4 years ago, collaborations between CARE members have generated 55 journal publications and $15M in funding. We’ve grown our email list to over 360 individuals, created a new website with 45 principal investigators, hosted 16 world-class speakers, 3 CARE Research Days, and 1 faculty retreat. The Cockrell School of Engineering has continued to generously financially support CARE, although given its multidisciplinary nature, I hope that in the future we can acquire funds from a broader cohort.
I think at this point we all know that CARE’s true benefit is not in the numbers. CARE is about getting graduate students from speech and kinesiology to have arguments over motor learning. It’s about expanding out of our intellectual comfort zone by attending talks by influential speakers that you normally wouldn’t see at our specialized conferences. It’s about supporting student-run organizations developing adaptive toys and adaptive cars for children. It’s about knowing what local resources and talent we have so we can become more than the sum of our parts. And finally, it’s about trying to connect the rehabilitation community, both research and clinical, of Central Texas. These are difficult qualities to convert into numbers, which makes it hard to appreciate, but no less important.
The future for CARE is bright. There is no better leadership than José del R. Millán, our new Co-Director with Linda. Dee and Billie will be continuing as well. Every time I speak about these people I’m ashamed that I cannot fully articulate all the positive attributes they exhibit. I am happy we have developed relationships with many clinics around Austin. But there is so much untapped potential that I regret not being able to access. I know our new leadership will help us reach that potential. I hope you all will support them with your continued participation and your suggestions. There are so many exciting initiatives happening right now that I will leave it to our new leadership to communicate.
These past two years have been the most challenging and transformative of my life. As you may know, 2 years ago this month, my daughter Livie suffered her brain injury. The support the CARE community has provided has been immeasurable. I would like to specifically thank Kathleen Manella, who worked with Livie every week for about a year and a half. I’m so fortunate to have had Kathleen and CARE behind me. There are many families out there who can’t manage the system. Communication between researchers, practicing clinicians and patients/caregivers is poor. Insurance sometimes makes mind-boggling decisions. There’s a severe nursing shortage. People need to adapt to a world and a society that doesn’t see them as normal. We - the research community - are positioned to do something about this, not 50 years from now, but today. Please reach out to these people and help them even if it’s not your research expertise. I’m heartened to see people like Elizabeth Cosgriff-Hernandez going beyond tissue engineering to create her adaptive toy program. I hope to emulate Elizabeth in the future and do more myself; I challenge you to find a way to help the community yourselves if you haven’t already.
I leave for Cleveland at the end of this month to MetroHealth Hospital and Case Western Reserve as a Staff Scientist/Associate Professor in the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. Everyone in my family is looking forward to the support we will receive from both sides of our extended families there. I’m going to be continuing my research on people with stroke and I’m excited to have my lab on a therapy floor! I’ve been so lucky to have such talented students at UT work on projects for Livie, and I hope to continue those projects in Cleveland. I also hope to continue to interact with CARE, perhaps even finding ways of connecting the vast rehabilitation research community in Cleveland with Austin.
I’m honored to have been a part of this and to have had the opportunity to get to know you. I look forward to hearing about the great things you accomplish together.
Sincerely,
James
