Dr. James Sulzer, APT Center Investigator, Staff Scientist at MetroHealth Medical Center, and Associate Professor in Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at Case Western Reserve University, received a 2-year, $400,000 award from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development entitled, “An Enriched, Immersive Rehabilitative Environment for Those with Traumatic Brain Injury”. The overall goal of this project is to explore whether community-dwelling individuals with moderate to severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) functionally benefit from real-world work experience by running a kiosk.

Dr. Sulzer and Co-PI Cole Galloway, PT, PhD (Baylor University), have assembled a team of multidisciplinary experts in physiatry (Victoria Whitehair, MD, MetroHealth), neuropsychology (Ketrin Lengu, PhD, MetroHealth), Physical Therapy (Kristine Hansen, PT, MetroHealth), Occupational Therapy (Terri Hisel, OT, MetroHealth), lived experience with TBI (Tony and Michelle Tomecko), biostatistics (Anna Rybinska-Campbell, CWRU) coordinated by postdoctoral fellow (Thomas Nown, PhD, MetroHealth).

They have teamed up with Patricia McClain from MetroHealth Food Services and local grocery chain Giant Eagle, Inc. to create two new food services run by individuals with TBI at the Old Brooklyn MetroHealth Medical Center, scheduled to begin in January 2025. One service will provide local baked goods from Davis Bakery in the morning and an ice cream selection in the afternoon. The other service will be a fully functional Giant Eagle kiosk that will serve prepackaged food in the late afternoon, staffed by both a Giant Eagle employee as well as one of the community dwelling research participants with TBI. These participants will work shifts over a period of two months while being observed using custom instrumentation in this “enriched environment”, with the expectation of improvements in cognitive and motor function, in addition to vocational gains.