Boston University | Health&Disability Research Institute | About

Alan M. Jette

Alan M. Jette currently directs the Boston University Health & Disability Research Institute. He also serves as Professor of Rehabilitation Sciences at Boston University ’s Sargent College of Health & Rehabilitation Sciences and Professor of Social & Behavioral Sciences at the Boston University 's School of Public Health . He received a BS in Physical Therapy from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1973 and his MPH (1975) and Ph.D. (1979) in Public Health from the University of Michigan.

Dr. Jette's research interests include late-life exercise, evaluation of treatment outcomes, and the measurement, epidemiology, and prevention of late-life disability. He has published over 125 articles on these topics in the rehabilitation, geriatrics, and public health literature. For the past 10 years, Dr. Jette directed the Edward R. Roybal Research Center on Enhancing Late-Life Function, funded by the National Institute on Aging. Within the Roybal Center , he and his colleagues tested and disseminated behavior intervention strategies designed to prevent late-life disablement. He also directs Boston University's Rehabilitation Research & Training Center on Measuring Rehabilitation Outcomes which is funded by the National Institute of Disability & Rehabilitation Research. In this Center, he and his colleagues are applying modern psychometric methods to the development of the next generation of outcome instruments for use in post acute care and rehabilitation.

Stephen M. Haley

Stephen M. Haley (Ph.D. Educational Psychology) is a senior scientist at the Health and Disability Institute at Boston University. He currently holds an academic appointment as a Professor, Department of Rehabilitation Sciences, Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences at Boston University. He received his Ph.D. at the University of Washington, and his clinical training in physical therapy at the Ohio State University. His primary specialty areas are in measurement of functional status in children and adults, outcomes research, and the application of item response theory models in computer adaptive testing applications in rehabilitation and post-acute health care settings.

Dr. Haley is the primary author of the Pediatric Evaluation of Disability Inventory (PEDI), a functional outcome measure for young children; he is a contributing author to the School Function Assessment (SFA), a functional assessment for elementary-aged school children, and the Late Life Function and Disability Instrument, a physical functioning measure for community-dwelling older adults. Dr. Haley is a research and measurement consultant to both pediatric and adult rehabilitation programs. He has served for the past seven years as the Director of Research for the Research Center for Children with Special Health Care Needs at Franciscan Children’sHospital in Boston.

Wendy J. Coster

Associate Professor and Director, Programs in Occupational Therapy; Department of Rehabilitation Sciences, and Research Investigator for the RRTC for Measuring Rehabilitation Outcomes, P4. Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, Boston University.

Dr. Coster has clinical training in occupational therapy and doctoral training in developmental psychology. She has published extensively in the areas of children's development, functional assessment and intervention and the measurement of outcomes. She is the primary author of the School Function Assessment (SFA), a widely-used functional assessment for elementary-aged school children with disabilities, was a contributing author of the Pediatric Evaluation of Disability Inventory (PEDI), a functional outcome measure for young children, and co-author of the Functional Assessment After Brain Injury (FABI), a clinical performance measure for programs serving children with acquired brain injuries.

Her current research activities include collaboration with Dr. Haley on three projects: development and testing of an activity measure to examine changes in function in adults across the continuum of rehabilitation care settings; developing computer-adaptive testing (CAT) methods to examine outcomes of rehabilitation services; and development of CAT methods to assess health and function in children. Dr. Coster has presented numerous papers and workshops to national and international audiences on functional assessment and on evidence-based rehabilitation.

Maria Fragala-Pinkham

Maria Fragala-Pinkham Research Associate, Health and Disability Research Institute Physical Therapist and Clinical Researcher, Franciscan Hospital for Children.

Ms. Fragala-Pinkham has extensive clinical experience as a physical therapist working with children in rehabilitation, school, early intervention and home-care settings. Her clinical research has focused on the effectiveness of physical therapy intervention for children with a variety of disabilities and on pediatric outcome measurement.

Nancy Latham

Nancy Latham, PhD, PT, is a Research Assistant Professor at the Health and Disability Research Institute and at Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences at Boston University. Dr. Latham is a physical therapist who has specialized in evaluating the effectiveness of rehabilitation interventions for older people and people with chronic disabling conditions. She is interested in applying methods from the field of clinical epidemiology, such as observational cohort studies, systematic reviews and randomized controlled trials to the field of rehabilitation. Her clinical trial experience includes conducting a multi-center randomized controlled trial of exercise training for frail older people. She has also conducted systematic reviews on several interventions to reduce disability in older adults, including a Cochrane systematic review and meta-analysis of strength training in older people.

Dr. Latham's PhD was undertaken at the Clinical Trials Research Unit at the University of Auckland in New Zealand and she was a post-doctoral fellow in Health Services Research at the Center for Rehabilitation Effectiveness at Boston University prior to joining the faculty. She is currently involved in research projects examining the patterns of functional change during hip fracture and stroke rehabilitation, and developing a measure to evaluate people with mobility impairment's satisfaction with their health care services.

Pengsheng Ni

Pengsheng Ni, MD, MPH has a strong biostatistical and computer science background. His primary research interest is the implementation of Item Response Theory (IRT) to practical health care issues. Dr. Ni has developed computerized adaptive testing models and constructed online surveys. He has expertise in various statistical programming software packages including SAS, Visual Basic, CGI and Perl.

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