(she/her/hers)

Dr. Rachel Proffitt is Assistant 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. Proffitt 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. Proffitt is PI of an NIH R21 to develop a new algorithm for activity recognition and assessment in the natural home environment for individuals post-stroke and the PI of an NIH R01 to evaluate a sensor system in the homes of rural community-dwelling older adults.