Body
When Tim Tansey was growing up in a large family in Oak Brook, Illinois, he saw a lot of graphic surgical slides and videos of bodily injuries and surgical repair. His father was an orthopedic surgeon and was always trying to improve his craft replacing knees and hips. Some of Tansey’s siblings were fascinated, and in fact, they followed their father into medicine years later, but Tansey was not enthusiastic. Still, he was inspired by the physics of his father’s work and chose engineering as his college major at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Halfway through the program, though, Tansey realized he wanted a career with more human contact. “The idea of crafting and construction interested me, but I got to a point where I realized there’s a lot less we know about how our brains work and how we relate to each other,” he says.
An advisor mentioned the rehabilitation field as a possibility. No blood involved, just helping people regain function and get on with their lives after surgery, injury, or illness. Tansey took several classes and thought it seemed like a good match for his interests. To make sure, Tansey got a job after graduation with a community rehabilitation provider. He started in a sheltered workshop and moved on to providing job development and placement for people with developmental disabilities and chronic mental illness. “I enjoyed the work and didn’t want to give it up” he says.
Work identity is a very important part of our adult identity
TIMOTHY TANSEY, PHD
Body
So even though his grades suffered a little, Tansey continued to work full-time while getting his master’s degree in rehabilitation counseling. “There are still examples I can draw on from that period 30 years ago: How to work with individuals, how to structure a task, how to engage with someone about how employers may treat them.” Tansey realized that he could make the biggest impact in the rehabilitation field if he focused on creating a better systemic model for assisting people with disabilities find work or keep their jobs. “Work identity is a very important part of our adult identity,” he says. “When an individual is missing that because society isn’t inclusive, there are a lot of secondary effects in terms of their self-esteem and self-worth.”
Tansey headed north to the University of Wisconsin in Madison for his doctoral work and then began a peripatetic academic career that took him to universities in Utah, Michigan and Texas. He came full circle in 2013 when he was hired as an assistant professor in rehabilitation psychology by UW Madison; he has been there since. A few years before the pandemic, Tansey was in China helping medical professionals understand the evolving model of vocational rehabilitation when he met Allen Heinemann, PhD, Director of the Center for Rehabilitation Outcomes Research (CROR) at the Shirley Ryan 小恩雅. Heinemann told him about the Rehabilitation Measures Database (RMD) that CROR had created, a compendium of hundreds of measurement tools for rehabilitation clinicians. Tansey made an off-the-cuff offer to help.
He has loads of good ideas about the RMD and other things we can do
LINDA EHRLICH-JONES, RN, PHD
Body
Back in the U.S. a few months later, he got an email from CROR Associate Director Linda Ehrlich-Jones, RN, PhD, asking if Tansey’s students could help with writing up additional measures. His students have been doing that since 2019, adding dozens of measurement instruments to the RMD. “He has loads of good ideas about the RMD and other things we can do,” says Ehrlich-Jones. “We really appreciate his input.” For his part, Tansey is sure he chose the right path. “I’m very happy with my career choice,” he says. “I enjoy the work I do, and I’m well compensated for it.”