August 6, 2024
Dr. Christina Papadimitriou, professor of Interdisciplinary Health Sciences (School of Health Sciences) and Sociology (College of Arts and Sciences) at Oakland University, has been selected as a 2024 Fellow by the American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine (ACRM). The designation recognizes active ACRM members with an outstanding record of professional service to ACRM who have also made contributions of national significance to the field of medical rehabilitation.
“Dr. Papadimitriou has earned top recognition in her field through being named a Fellow,” said Dr. Kevin Ball, dean of the School of Health Sciences. “This designation is awarded through a peer-recognition process and signifies the most knowledgeable experts in ACRM. We are thrilled to have Christina amongst this distinct, selective group of leaders in the field of physical medicine and rehabilitation.”
Papadimitriou and her fellow inductees will be recognized for their service and achievement at the ACRM Awards Gala during the ACRM 2024 Annual Conference, which will take place Oct. 31 – Nov. 3 in Dallas, Texas.
“I am truly honored to receive this award,” Papadimitriou said. “The award validates my work advocating for rehabilitation justice and equity for accessible services for people with disabilities.”
Dr. Papadimitriou conducts field-based human subject research using interdisciplinary training in sociology and health services research.
“All of my work is inter-professional and I collaborate with a diverse group of health professionals and scholars from a range of disciplines, such as occupational and physical therapy, speech pathology, psychology, economics, philosophy, nursing, linguistics, and medicine,” she said.
Her scholarship aims to identify and make visible the assumptions that people take for granted about what it means to live with disability in society.
“This requires rethinking disability-related medical rehabilitation research and practice,” Papadimitriou said. “The lenses my associates and I use are inspired by phenomenology, social justice and equity, and disability studies. I use an equity-based hermeneutic approach to make invisible positions and experiences visible in order to develop inclusive and collaborative rehabilitation practices and assessments that can lead to greater effectiveness and shared benefits for those we serve.”
Her most cited work, and the work that has drawn the most international attention, includes efforts to conceptually expand humanity’s understanding of disability rehabilitation and challenge taken-for-granted assumptions.
“The concepts of en-wheeling, temporal and existential disruption, combine philosophy and social science perspectives to suggest that disability is part of human diversity and that our professional and disciplinary blinders prevent us from treating persons with disabilities as fully human and result in our missing important aspects of their post-injury recovery and re-habituation,” Papadimitriou said.
Papadimitriou is co-developing a relationship-centered assessment for persons who need high level of support due to cognitive disabilities with a group of scholars, practitioners, and care partners. She co-directs the Advanced Metrics Lab with Professor Trudy Mallinson at The George Washington University.
“With Dr. Marla L. Clayman (VA), we led our team in creating a new model for PMR and chronic disability called the Relationship-Centered Shared Decision Making Process model (RCSDM) to support understanding the complex relationships that exist in clinical encounters among rehabilitation practitioners, patients with chronic disabilities and high support needs, and their care partners,” Papadimitriou said.
Discover this work at www.advancedmetricslab.smhs.gwu.edu/sparcsdm-research-study.
Papadimitriou is also studying peer navigation to improve health and healthcare outcomes and community participation for persons with physical disabilities in the U.S.A.
“With my long-time collaborator, Dr. Susan Magasi (University of Illinois Chicago), we published a framework for how to best design peer support interventions in PMR that will hopefully support the field in developing theory-informed peer support programs.”
At OU, Dr. Papadimitriou and Dr. Jo Reger co-lead a new Senate committee on Disability Literacy and Awareness whose vision is to raise the profile of disability as a previously underrecognized way of understanding human diversity, to be included with other urgent areas of inquiry and identity in DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) such as race, class, and gender.
To learn more about Dr. Papadimitriou’s work, visit www.christinapapadimitriouphd.com.
For more information about the American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine, visit www.acrm.org.