My substantial curiosity allows me to question thoughtfully and deeply. Intellectual flexibility allows me to hold answers loosely. This is what drives my interest in research: pursuing truth in the service of doing good.

The question at the center of my scholarly work is this: What conditions enable human beings to flourish? This question has guided over 35 years of clinical practice, is leading me through doctoral studies in Health Education and Leadership, and shapes my emerging scholarly agenda. I pursue it across two interconnected domains directly relevant to healthcare professional education: how healthcare professionals can improve their personal and organizational well-being through the cultivation of sustainable compassion, and how professional learning environments can be intentionally designed to support student flourishing, not just academic performance, but the whole-person development of future clinicians. A third area of applied research in advanced mobility assessment platforms, gait analytics, and clinical technology extends my clinical expertise into translational scholarship.

My interest in human learning and transformation began with my master’s thesis at Touro College (1990), which investigated whether multi-modal learning approaches could produce more durable postural improvements than verbal instruction alone in individuals with Parkinson’s disease. The idea that the method of learning shapes the durability of change planted seeds for my broader interest in behavior change, the neurological foundations of transformation, and the conditions under which lasting improvement becomes possible.

That interest has been deepened by lived experience: my own 200-pound weight loss sustained for over two decades, the transformations I have witnessed in people across 35 years of clinical and coaching practice, and the organizational cultures I have helped shape through consulting, facilitation, and educational work.

Healthcare burnout has reached epidemic proportions, recognized by the World Health Organization as an occupational phenomenon in ICD-11 (2022). The prevailing term “compassion fatigue” implies that caring itself depletes clinicians. However, neuroscientific research by Singer and Klimecki (2014) reveals that empathy and compassion activate different neural pathways. Empathy, feeling another’s suffering, engages pain-processing regions and depletes the caregiver. Compassion, feeling concern for another with motivation to help, activates reward and affiliation networks, energizing rather than exhausting (Klimecki et al., 2014). What healthcare workers experience as “compassion fatigue” is more accurately described as empathic distress fatigue. The solution is not caring less but learning to care differently.

My doctoral scholarly project (DSP) at Nebraska Methodist College examines loving-kindness meditation (LKM) as an intervention for reducing burnout among healthcare professionals, drawing on Fredrickson and colleagues’ (2008) research demonstrating that positive emotions increase significantly over a six-week LKM program, Neff’s (2003) work connecting self-compassion to improved self-care, and conceptualizing burnout as an occupational distress syndrome characterized by a dysfunction of human well-being based on the six-dimensional model proposed by Ryff (1989).

In February 2026, I will translate this research into an invited workshop for 140 managers at Baylor Scott & White Institute for Rehabilitation: “From Empathy to Compassion: Combating Burnout Through Sustainable Caring.”

This research has direct implications for healthcare professional education. A 10-year longitudinal study found that anxiety and coping patterns established during the second and fourth years of medical school predicted distinct career outcome profiles, including vulnerability to burnout, career satisfaction, and professional competence years later (Walkiewicz et al., 2012).

In physical therapy specifically, Luna et al. (2024) demonstrated that DPT students who experienced burnout during training entered the workforce with significantly elevated emotional exhaustion scores, confirming that the patterns students establish during professional education travel with them into practice. Meanwhile, Taylor et al. (2024) found a strong inverse relationship between emotional intelligence and burnout in an interprofessional sample that included DPT students, with prior emotional intelligence training emerging as a significant protective factor. Taken together, these findings reinforce a central premise of my research agenda: integrating compassion and emotional intelligence practices into student development prepares future clinicians not just to pass licensure examinations but to actually be well and sustain effective, caring practice across decades.

My emerging scholarly agenda centers on how educational environments, particularly hybrid and accelerated professional programs, can be designed to support student flourishing. This area integrates my clinical expertise in behavior change, my doctoral training in health education, and my practical experience founding the Betterness Institute (2007 to 2020), where I developed systematic coaching programs grounded in evidence-based behavior change principles and WellCoaches® coaching methodology.

Several converging lines of research inform this agenda. Edmondson’s (1999) work on psychological safety demonstrates that environments where students feel safe to take interpersonal risks, ask questions, and admit mistakes produce better learning outcomes than those focused solely on performance metrics. Mercurio’s (2023) research on mattering shows that the experience of being valued and relied upon is a fundamental human need with measurable effects on engagement and retention. Poole et al. (2023) found that belongingness among DPT students was significantly predicted by peer interaction and faculty engagement, with important implications for program design. And Ensmann et al. (2021) demonstrated that in hybrid learning environments, connections must precede curriculum: students who feel disconnected cannot fully engage with academic material regardless of its quality.

These constructs, psychological safety, mattering, belongingness, and social presence, describe overlapping dimensions of the same human need: to feel seen, valued, and connected within the communities where we learn. 

In hybrid professional programs, cultivating these conditions is a design imperative. My scholarly interest lies in investigating how structured coaching programs, faculty development initiatives, and intentional community-building practices affect student outcomes including retention, professional identity formation, and long-term career resilience.

Through consulting work with Nuvio Mobility and Well-Aware Care, I maintain an applied research interest in advanced gait assessment technologies, including LIDAR-based and micro-Doppler radar systems for contactless fall detection and prediction. Emerging machine learning approaches (Mishra et al., 2021; Tunca et al., 2020) are demonstrating clinically meaningful predictive accuracy. This translational work bridges engineering innovation and patient-centered outcomes, and I anticipate contributing to validation studies and educational applications as these technologies enter clinical practice.

My research plan is organized around three initiatives with specific deliverables:

Compassion Training Research (Years 1–2). I will complete my doctoral scholarly project and pursue publication. I plan to develop a pilot study examining an LKM/self-compassion/emotional intelligence intervention for healthcare professional students in accelerated programs, investigating its effects on perceived stress, professional identity development, and academic performance. Students could participate as both study participants and mentored co-investigators.

Student Flourishing in Hybrid Professional Education (Years 2–4). Building on coaching and mentoring infrastructure within student affairs and academic support roles, I plan to investigate the relationship between structured coaching programs and student outcomes. Specific research questions include: How do coaching group structures affect sense of belonging in hybrid learning environments? What faculty coaching practices most effectively support retention and professional identity formation? How can emotional intelligence and grit assessments at program entry be used to target developmental interventions? This agenda positions student development infrastructure as both a programmatic resource and a scholarly platform, with findings applicable to the growing number of hybrid professional programs nationally. Target journals include the Journal of Physical Therapy Education, Physical Therapy, and the Internet and Higher Education.

Technology and Humanity in Healthcare Education (Years 3–5). I am exploring how artificial intelligence can augment professional education and free educators for the relational work no algorithm can replicate: mentoring conversations, coaching sessions, and the human connection that teaches future clinicians what it means to be fully present with a patient.

The risk is subtle but worth naming: we can appear to improve educational delivery while simultaneously degrading the human outcomes education is intended to produce. One concrete example is student assessment. As AI tools make it easier to generate polished written products, traditional assessments increasingly measure a student’s ability to leverage technology rather than their depth of understanding. My interest includes designing process-based assessment tools that evaluate how students think, reason, and arrive at clinical decisions, rather than product-based assessments that evaluate only what students submit.

Process-based approaches, such as documented reasoning sequences, real-time clinical decision mapping, and reflective narration of problem-solving steps, preserve the integrity of assessment while rendering the question of AI assistance largely irrelevant.

My broader interest is in ensuring that as our tools become more powerful, our commitment to the human elements of education becomes more intentional. This inquiry connects naturally to both the compassion research and the student flourishing agenda.

A core conviction guides my approach to scholarship: research in professional education should directly improve the programs, professions, and students it studies, as well as the patients and communities those students will serve across their careers. Institutional roles that emphasize coaching groups, mentoring, faculty coach training, emotional intelligence assessments, and fostering belonging in hybrid learning environments represent a rare alignment between scholarly interests and institutional responsibility. My research would be strengthened by such roles, and those roles would be strengthened by being grounded in evidence. Student development infrastructure in hybrid professional programs is not merely administrative; it is an opportunity to build, study, and refine evidence-based practices that can serve as a model for healthcare professional education nationally.

I want to be part of an intellectual and academic community where scholarship serves the people it studies. Whether investigating how contemplative practices sustain healthcare professionals, how coaching structures build belonging in hybrid programs, or how technology can serve rather than supplant the human elements of education, the fundamental aim remains constant: pursuing truth in the service of doing good.

Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999

Ensmann, S., Whiteside, A., Gomez-Vasquez, L., & Sturgill, R. (2021). Connections before curriculum: The role of social presence during COVID-19 emergency remote learning for students. Online Learning, 25(3), 36–56. https://doi.org/10.24059/olj.v25i3.2868

Fredrickson, B. L., Cohn, M. A., Coffey, K. A., Pek, J., & Finkel, S. M. (2008). Open hearts build lives: Positive emotions, induced through loving-kindness meditation, build consequential personal resources. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95(5), 1045–1062. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0013262

Klimecki, O. M., Leiberg, S., Ricard, M., & Singer, T. (2014). Differential pattern of functional brain plasticity after compassion and empathy training. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 9(6), 873–879. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nst060

Luna, B. M., Brown, C. L., & Kish, M. M. (2024). Professional burnout development and transition: A longitudinal study of physical therapy students to early career professionals. Journal of Physical Therapy Education, 38(2), 145–153. https://doi.org/10.1097/JTE.0000000000000318

Mercurio, Z. (2023). The power of mattering: How leaders can create what people need most. Zondervan Reflective.

Mishra, A., Wang, Y., Li, J., & Kumar, S. (2021). Machine learning approaches for gait-based fall risk assessment: A systematic review. Sensors, 21(10), 3437. https://doi.org/10.3390/s21103437

Neff, K. D. (2003). The development and validation of a scale to measure self-compassion. Self and Identity, 2(3), 223–250. https://doi.org/10.1080/15298860309032

Poole, J. C., Iqbal, A. E., & Verrier, M. C. (2023). Belongingness in doctor of physical therapy students: Relationships with peer interaction and faculty engagement. Journal of Physical Therapy Education, 37(1), 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1097/JTE.0000000000000276

Ryff, C. D. (1989). Happiness is everything, or is it? Explorations on the meaning of psychological well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57(6), 1069–1081. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.57.6.1069

Singer, T., & Klimecki, O. M. (2014). Empathy and compassion. Current Biology, 24(18), R875–R878. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2014.06.054

Taylor, E. V., Smith, A. B., Jones, L. R., & Chen, D. (2024). Emotional intelligence and burnout in interprofessional healthcare students: A cross-sectional analysis. BMC Medical Education, 24(1), Article 312. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-024-05295-2

Tunca, C., Salur, G., & Ersoy, C. (2020). Deep learning for fall risk assessment with inertial sensors: Utilizing domain knowledge in spatio-temporal gait parameters. IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics, 24(7), 1994–2005. https://doi.org/10.1109/JBHI.2019.2958879

Walkiewicz, M., Tartas, M., Majkowicz, M., & Budzinski, W. (2012). Academic achievement, depression, and anxiety during medical education predict the styles of success in a medical career: A 10-year longitudinal study. Medical Teacher, 34(9), e611–e619. https://doi.org/10.3109/0142159X.2012.687478

World Health Organization. (2022). International classification of diseases (11th rev.). https://icd.who.int/