Teal W. Benevides, PhD, MS, OTR/L, FAOTA, is a wife, mother, occupational therapist, and researcher. Dr. Benevides is a tenured Associate Professor in the Institute of Public and Preventive Health at Augusta University.

Dr. Benevides is committed to fostering access to services and support for autistic people and others with intellectual and developmental disabilities through community-engaged approaches and partnerships.

Dr. Benevides is a Fellow of the American Occupational Therapy Association and serves on autism, suicide prevention, and occupational therapy organizations as a board or committee member to advance scientific knowledge translation and promote community priorities.

Dr. Davies, director of the Brainwaves Research Laboratory at Colorado State University, focuses on understanding the development of neurophysiological mechanisms that underlie cognitive and motor behaviors in children with and without disorders.

Davies holds joint appointments in the Departments of Occupational Therapy, Psychology and Human Development and Family Studies, and is a faculty member in the Molecular, Cellular, and Integrated Neuroscience Program. She is a member of three interdisciplinary research teams: one developing brain-computer interfaces, one applying universal design for learning and post-secondary opportunities for college students with disabilities, and one developing and implementing obesity prevention interventions for young children. Davies has served on editorial boards for the American Journal of Occupational Therapy, the Occupational Therapy Journal of Research, and Occupational Therapy in Pediatrics. Davies received her B.S. in occupational therapy from CSU. She earned her M.S. and Ph.D. in neuroscience and developmental psychology from the University of Wyoming.

Dr. Rachel Wolpert is Associate Professor in the Department of Occupational Therapy at the University of Missouri. Her research focuses on developing, testing, and implementing virtual reality-based interventions for adults and older adults post-stroke. Dr. Wolpert has extensive experience working in an interdisciplinary setting with computer scientists and engineers and was previously the Director of the Game Based Rehab Lab at the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California (USC). She has completed a T32 postdoctoral fellowship with an emphasis in rehabilitation clinical trials as well as a KL2 Career Development Award. She is currently translating effective interventions, such as LSVT®BIG, for use with the stroke population and pairing telehealth applications for remote delivery in rural areas. Dr. Wolpert is PI of an NIH R01 to evaluate a sensor system in the homes of rural community-dwelling older adults.

Dr. Reistetter is Professor and Associate Dean for Research in the School of Health Professions at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center in San Antonio (as of January 2019). He is widely recognized for his leadership in health services research within rehabilitation in general, and in occupational therapy specifically. Through Dr. Reistetter’s K12, K01, and subsequently his currently funded Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality R01, he has brought the discussion of how to measure rehabilitation geographic regions to the forefront. Specifically, he is translating methodology from the hospital-centric research conducted at Dartmouth College and implementing these approaches to a rehabilitation context to define rehabilitation geographic services areas. Prior to Dr. Reistetter’s seminal work, any researchers examining geographic variations in rehabilitation quality of care were limited to the hospital-based regions, called Hospital Service Areas, even if they did not adequately reflect the context and environment in which rehabilitation was provided across the country, as this was the accepted approach. Thus, it has been Tim’s work, which has focused on developing and evaluating Rehabilitation Service Areas that has provided health services researchers with the necessary tools to effectively measure variations in service delivery, access, and quality.