Jessica Smith, a current 3rd year student in the Belmont Physical Therapy program, has been awarded the Belmont University Graduate Student Scholarship Award. The Award recognizes an exceptional student within all Belmont University graduate programs distinguished through outstanding academic performance as demonstrated through a consistent pattern of academic success coupled with the production of original scholarly research, writing, creative output and/or performance, as appropriate to the student’s discipline and graduate degree. This award is conferred in recognition of the recipient’s capacity to engage with insight, integrity, diligence, creativity, and reflection in professional activity relevant to the graduate degree sought, while demonstrating habits of mind reflective of open-mindedness, maturity, and generosity essential to becoming an inspiring professional in his or her chosen career path.
Jessica has gone above and beyond in her research efforts, and has served as a leader and inspiration in the area of scholarship within the DPT program. As part of the requirements for the physical therapy program, students are placed in groups of 4-5 to conduct their research. The students then develop their review of literature, research question(s), determine the best methods to address their question(s), collect and analyze their data and then present their data at our research symposium, held in the fall semester of their third year. All of this work has to be performed at the same time the students are taking their course work (average of 20 hours per semester) throughout the program. Students are connected with a faculty research mentor for their projects, and in this case, Smith worked extensively with Dr. Kevin Robinson, PT, DSc, OCS, on data collection related to the Nashville Ballet.
Dr. Robinson notes, “I have been working with the Nashville Ballet for the past 6 years, studying ways to identify performers who are at risk for musculoskeletal injuries during the course of their season. Jess was the lead member of her group. As the lead member, she took on the responsibilities of coordinating the data collection with the dancers and the Ballet staff, analyzing the 3 dimensional data and strength data that was collected, and she was the lead editor of the group paper.”