A Career in Rehab Science

A Typical Day in the Life of a Rehab Scientist:
My field is Neurorehabilition Sciences. I am a Clinician-Scientist: a Clinical Neuropsycholigist and a Neurorehab Scientist.

A typical day may include any or all of the following:
- Examining research findings
- Meeting with students or colleagues
- Providing clinical results to patients with TBI
- Reading journal articles
- Tweaking/designing a study
- Reviewing a grant proposal, talk, manuscript

Career Options
Within the very broad field of rehabilitation, there are a variety of career options after a PhD. These include:

- Independent scientist
o paid to do research only;
this entails generating your own research agenda and usually running a lab

- Clinician scientist
o work as both a clinician (e.g., OT, doctor, Psychologist, PT) AND a researcher

- Academic clinicians / clinician researchers
o paid to be a professor or a clinician, but do research on the side

- Advocacy

- Health-care administration

Rewards of the Profession
- Discovery: looking at data from experiments, making or reading about a ‘discovery’, learning from journals, colleagues, students, patients
- Intellectual: Meeting of minds; brain-storming; new collaborations
- Accomplishments: Grant or paper accepted
- Sharing: Sharing your work
- Lifestyle: Flexibility
- HELPING! (includes using insights from own life experience)

 
What does it take for a career in research?

- Publications and grants are the key deliverables

To thrive and enjoy this career, you also need:
- Passion for research
- Enjoyment of data and making things
- Commitment
- Patience
- Tolerance: sometimes grants and papers are rejected; you are often being evaluated through the process of grant/paper submission
- Some sacrifice
– Research can be consuming, for better or for worse!