HSIP student Emily Dinelli awarded prestigious Mobility is Freedom Fund scholarship

By Andrew Nellis
August, 27 2024

Emily Dinelli, L/CPO, a third-year PhD student in Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine’s Health Sciences Integrated program (HSIP), has been awarded the Mobility is Freedom Fund (MiFF) scholarship for her research into the unmet needs of Black populations with dysvascular lower limb amputations (LLA), their treatment and patient outcomes .

The Mobility is Freedom Fund scholarship is a highly competitive grant awarded to PhD candidates pursuing multidisciplinary research related to rehabilitation science and provides $50,000 in unrestricted funding.  The 2024 Mobility is Freedom Fund PhD Scholar Award was made possible, in part, thanks to a grant from the Wellcome Foundation.

“I’m incredibly grateful for the recognition, but I’m also really hopeful that this award will support our understanding of a long-overlooked population,” Dinelli said. “The number of people with lower limb amputations, particularly those caused by diabetes and vascular disease, will continue to grow in the coming years. It’s vital that we better understand their experiences post-amputation to ensure they’re getting the best possible care.”

The Mobility is Freedom Fund is a nonprofit organization dedicated to enhancing higher education in rehabilitation sciences with a focus on amputee care. The group believes that all persons who experience limb loss have a right to access multidisciplinary rehabilitation treatment.

“Our entire Mobility is Freedom Fund team joins me in congratulating Emily Dinelli as our 2024 PhD Scholar grant recipient," said Charles H. Dankmeyer, Jr., CPO, the Founder and President of Mobility is Freedom Fund. "We are unanimous in our excitement that she is a gifted health professional, with extraordinarily promising research and patient care talents with a long, distinguished career ahead that will benefit care of amputees, and other mobility impaired persons.”

Dinelli has focused much of her PhD on seeking to understand the lived experiences of people with physical disabilities and is continuing this effort among people with amputations. As a certified prosthetist orthotist, she has seen first-hand how the everyday realities of an amputee can go unnoticed.

“For certain groups of patients with amputations, there are many more hurdles to getting the same level of accommodation and care, particularly when it comes to their home environment and communities,” Dinelli said.

Dinelli has observed that many patients living with amputations often lack appropriate support systems, home accommodations, and assistance with reintegrating into their communities after their amputations, which can have significant impacts on their recovery and quality of life. The goal of Dinelli’s doctoral research is to better understand exactly how specific unmet environmental needs are related to comorbidities, complications, and mortality for the Black amputee community, and how providers can utilize multidisciplinary care to meet those needs.

Dysvascular lower limb amputation is performed when a person’s limb becomes damaged due to complications from diabetes or other vascular diseases and accounts for 80% of all lower-extremity amputations. Black individuals are four times more likely to need the procedure. Research suggests that social determinants of health (SDOH) contribute to those higher rates of amputation among Black populations, but the dynamic is still not fully understood.

Allen Heinemann, PhD, professor in physical medicine and rehabilitation, spoke to the importance of Dinelli’s research topic and her promise as a rehabilitation scientist.

“The study of racial health disparities in medical rehabilitation is an emerging area of inquiry and can illuminate systemic issues within the rehabilitation service system that contribute to disparities,” Heinemann said. “Emily is uniquely qualified to examine this topic with her clinical background as a prosthetist orthotist, her scholarly interests in health services research, and her passion for improving rehabilitation services and patient care.”

The Health Sciences Integrated PhD Program (HSIP) offers doctoral training across multiple disciplines within the health sciences, spanning informatics and program evaluation to implementation science and outcomes research. It builds upon existing master's degree programs in these fields and incorporates new areas of strength in measurement and health behavior. Integration across these programs provides the flexibility for doctoral students to receive rigorous interdisciplinary training in the core content needed for population and health research in the 21st century.