Author: Glen Jennings

Julie Pfeiffer staff photo. She has long, brown hair and is wearing a black shirt.

Dr. Julie Pfeiffer receives prestigious Burberry Award

Posted on | by Glen Jennings

This year’s winner of the Kevin Burberry award is Julie Pfeiffer in honor of her work with airline accessibility. 

The yearly Kevin Burberry Award honors students who work with HDI and demonstrate commitment to the cause of accessibility, leadership qualities, and academic excellence. Pfeiffer’s work focused heavily on accessibility aboard airplanes, the experiences of travelers with disabilities, and how the many problems they face can be solved. 

“It’s often overlooked. I think it’s well acknowledged within the disability community that it is a major impediment to transportation, but often we’re met with not a lot of help,” said Dr. Tony Lobianco, who was on the award’s selection committee. “It’s clear that she’s really listened to people with disabilities.”

Pfeiffer found her way to this research through her work in physical therapy, when she noticed that her clients faced massive obstacles when attempting to travel. 

“I worked specifically with people who had spinal cord injuries, and I had several clients who had issues flying as wheelchair users,” she said. “Some of them even had their wheelchair either damaged or lost…Because they didn’t have their wheelchair, they had to stay in bed for several weeks at a time until their wheelchair was returned to them.”

Though Pfeiffer’s work began with a focus on the treatment of travelers who use wheelchairs, she discovered that it’s just one of the ways people with disabilities can face disproportionate challenges while trying to travel by air. For example, she mentioned that it can be difficult to travel with a service animal. 

“People who use service animals file a lot of complaints against the airlines related to how they’ve been treated,” she said. 

Though the researchers have yet to dig deep into the specific reasons for these complaints, Pfeiffer said there are a lot of common themes in the stories people with service animals tell, and that she expects to see similar stories here. 

Even though there’s more work to be done, Pfeiffer is proud of what has been accomplished so far through her research, with substantial efforts going towards education, which Pfeiffer indicated was one of the biggest areas of continued need. Through this project, HDI produced publications, held seminars, and educated relevant people about what air travel problems exist and how they can be solved. In addition, they’ve started a project that involves combing through multiple complaints filed by passengers with disabilities about the treatment they have received in the past. 

During the process, Pfeiffer said that she also learned a lot about the subject of disability – particularly, she learned for the first time about the Social Model of Disability, which positions disability as a natural part of the world and argues that many of the obstacles people with disabilities face are not inherently a product of disability, but a result of a world that refuses to accommodate it. 

For Lobianco’s part, he feels that Pfeiffer’s research touches on one of the last frontiers for accessible transportation. 

“We, as a disability community, fought so hard for other forms of accessible transportation – most notably public ground transportation,” he said. “The airlines seem to be the one that is often left out of that equation.”

Pfeiffer said she was humbled to receive the award, especially after seeing what some other students were doing in their research. 

“It kind of puts the significance of this research into perspective,” she said. “A lot of students at HDI are doing a lot of great things.”

graphic medicine with various images behind the title

HDI receives WITH Foundation Grant to support work in Graphic Medicine

Posted on | by Glen Jennings

Thanks to a grant from the WITH Foundation, HDI will have the opportunity to create new resources in the emerging field of graphic medicine.  

“Graphic medicine is a field which explores the intersection between comics and illustration or graphic formats with the field of healthcare, health, and medicine,” said Erin Fitzgerald, who brings her expertise with graphic medicine to the project. 
Fitzgerald explained that graphic medicine frequently uses sequential art forms like comics to explore medical topics. Comics, Fitzgerald noted, are one of the more common formats used in the field, but there are other forms of visual media that it uses. It can allow for more voices in medical fields, reduces the distance between patient and doctor, and follows the principles of universal design by offering easily understood explanations of medical information.  

And thanks to the help of the WITH Foundation, HDI hopes to expand its library of graphic medicine resources.  

“We want to curate existing graphic medicine materials that might be relevant for people, and then create new graphic medicine materials using teams of people,” said Project Director Laura Butler. “Each material will have a team that has a person with a disability who’s identifying an issue in healthcare that they want to discuss or improve, and they will work with one of our project team members as well as a creative to bring that graphic medicine piece to life.” 

In addition, the grant will allow HDI to deepen its relationship with UK HealthCare. The two organizations are already working together on a transition-to-work program for high school students with intellectual and developmental disabilities called Project SEARCH. This new grant will allow the two more chances to use stories of lived experience to address barriers to healthcare access, as well as to increase understanding of healthcare processes and experiences for both patients and practitioners. 

This won’t be the first time that HDI and the WITH Foundation have partnered. This is the third time HDI has worked with the foundation, and in the past, the collaboration produced a short comic that explained the process of drawing blood. Though Butler said she didn’t recognize it as graphic medicine at the time, now she’d think of it as a high quality example of the form. This project aims to create more resources of a similar nature.  

“This project will improve access to healthcare for people with developmental disabilities (DD) through the use of graphic medicine. People with DD will work collaboratively with creatives (visual and graphic artists) and healthcare clinicians to create materials that communicate both the patient and the provider side the healthcare experience,” the grant proposal said. “People with DD will develop the concept for each set of materials by drawing on their lived experiences and creatives and clinicians will bring the concepts to fruition by using their own areas of expertise. Members of the collaborative teams will be identified on an as-needed basis in order to foster a fluid and creative space for innovation.” 

Butler and Fitzgerald aren’t sure what specific materials will be created with this project. Before they see what that could be, they have to unite the teams that will create the new resources. But both are excited to see how this could help people eliminate barriers to quality healthcare for people with disabilities.  

“So many people have stories about things that have gone wrong with healthcare,” Butler said. “Anything we can do to make that process easier is good…Hopefully these types of things will make it less intimidating, and less overwhelming for people.” 

Fitzgerald agreed, noting that stories of the challenges people with disabilities face when finding quality healthcare often go untold. This project, however, would put the power in their hands to help solve those problems.  

“It is so rare when people with lived experience with disability are asked to participate in something as an equal partner and as a consultant,” she said. “The way a lot of our systems in society are structured is that we look at the majority – and anything outside of that, we kind of get to it when we get to it. So this kind of collaboration is really important to me, where we start with perspective and experience that is usually considered as an afterthought.” 

Exploring Intersectionality: How Disabled and Queer Identity Shape Mental Health Care According to Dr. Rachel Womack

Posted on | by Glen Jennings

Research has shown a strong connection between queer identity and disability—a connection Dr. Rachel Womack is deeply familiar with. 

“The research shows that folks with disabilities are significantly more likely to identify as queer, and vice versa,” Womack said. “That connection is particularly strong for individuals who are autistic, and with autistic people, we see that there is a significantly higher likelihood of identifying as trans or gender nonconforming.”

This is a fairly recent discovery that has seen little research. 

“What many don’t know is that this intersection exists all across the disability and the queer spectrum,” Womack said. “We see things like lesbians being significantly more likely to identify as having a physical disability, compared to heterosexual women.”

Likewise, Womack said a lot of people studying this connection focus primarily on why the correlation exists, but Womack’s greatest curiosities lie elsewhere.

“To me, that’s not the most important question we should be asking. As a social worker, and as someone who is queer herself and also works in the disability space,” she said, “I think the better questions are, how can we support these folks and how can we change social views, social norms and perceptions to create an environment that’s safer for people who are both disabled and queer?”

Womack has actively researched the way disability and queer identity interact in mental health services. 

Womack has actively researched the intersectionality of disability and queerness in mental health services. For her dissertation, she interviewed people who identified as queer and disabled and explored how those identities affect the therapist-client relationship, something she said was a new frontier in this field of research. 

“That can be a space that is, I think, particularly difficult for folks to navigate, especially when we think about providers and their knowledge of serving the queer and disabled population,” she said. “It’s something that needs a lot more attention than it gets.”

Womack’s Findings

Womack noted that understanding queer clients has come a long way in recent years, but providers’ understanding of disability has a long way to go in many cases. 

“What I found a lot is that there were quite a few providers who were queer and who were pretty well versed on the culture that comes with that and some of the issues that the queer community faces, but those people had no real knowledge or understanding of disability,” she said. “There is often a misunderstanding of where is the line? What are we actually looking to treat and what do we accept as part of who this person is?”

In addition, Womack noted that some queer identities, such as asexuality, are not as well-understood among providers and their misconceptions can alienate people who are seeking help. She believes training can help address these misconceptions. 

“As much as [social workers and other mental health professionals] may take a social model approach to other aspects of identity, we don’t really do that with disability a lot of the time,” she said. “I think, sometimes it gets lumped into conversations around mental illness. So maybe if there’s discussion of autism, it’s in a class on psychopathology…providers often become so deeply ingrained in this medical model of disability that it can be really hard for them to step out of that.”

She also thinks providers compartmentalize people’s identities and said, “They didn’t know how to take an intersectional perspective, where they’re looking at the experience of this person who is queer and disabled. They were only looking at these things in pieces.” 

Womack discussed the impact of providers who had marginalized identities themselves on service provision. Often, providers with any marginalized identity created a more comfortable space for queer clients with disabilities, even in cases where it wasn’t an identity clients shared. It was rare for providers to disclose whether or not they had a disability. Womack suspects that this, much like other patterns her research highlighted, is due to the more medical approach in the field’s education practices. 

Education is the easiest place to start fixing those problems. Womack noted that no educational program could teach providers everything, but they could still have a profound impact if they changed their approach. 

“They can teach folks to look at disability in a certain way and to consider disability in a certain way,” she said. “The most important thing that we can be teaching these future mental health providers is to learn from people who identify as disabled.”

Thompson Earns Universal Design Certificate

Posted on | by Glen Jennings

Elizabeth Thompson has been involved with HDI for a while, but she’s always ready for an opportunity to learn more. 

Thompson, who works with the RETAIN project in Administrative Support, recently received her certificate in Universal Design. 

“I started my journey with HDI350-Introduction to Universal Design in the fall of 2022, and then I finished it up this most recent semester in ’24,” Thompson said. 

The certification program teaches seven basic principles of universal design – Equitable Use, Flexibility in Use, Simple and Intuitive Use, Perceptible Information, Tolerance for Error, Low Physical Effort, and Size and Space for Approach and Use – then explains how to apply these ideas in multiple different spaces. 

Though Thompson was already acquainted with aspects of universal design, she came away with a much broader and wider perspective on the subject. 

“I was able to stretch my own thoughts and opinions about what universal design is,” she said. “Whatever you’re looking at, especially websites and…documents and things like that, that there is just so much that can be improved for people to increase the accessibility.”

And while learning about digital accessibility and the many tools that can be used both to enable it and to assess it. 

However, as much as she appreciated learning about those things, when they began to cover universal design in terms of physical space, Thompson got really excited. 

“That’s always been my thing,” she said. “I’ve remodeled several houses for my own living and one for my parents, so I really, really like that physical world of making sure that someone has full access and can go as many places as possible.”

Thompson also talked about how earning this certificate helped her learn about the ways in which universal design can help everyone, not just people with disabilities. 

“A ramp makes it accessible for someone who uses a wheelchair or power wheelchair,” Thompson said. “But the mother or father with a stroller, that ramp is very useful for them. Even somebody who’s walking their pet. Not all animals like to go up and down steps. It just broadens the access.”

All in all, Thompson said the entire process was an excellent learning experience that gave her a lot of new knowledge and tools that can help a lot of people. 

“There was no part that didn’t excite me,” she said. “Universal design helps the world to be more accessible for everybody.”


To learn more about the UDL Certificate, follow this link: https://oldhdi.hdiuky.net/undergraduate-certificate. 

Gayle Bartilow Staff Photo

Dr. Bartilow receives Cooter Social Justice Advocate Award and dissertation of the year

Posted on | by Glen Jennings

Dr. Gayle Bartilow was not prepared for how much of an effect her dissertation research would have on her. 

When she traveled to South Africa to do research on how apartheid had affected educational opportunities and how modern South Africans are working to decolonize education to build a better system, she expected that she would hear some difficult stories, but she had no idea exactly how intense it would get. 

“I was not prepared for the level of, hardship, violence, and the heart wrenching stories that came out,” she said. “I did not expect to hear that some of the people that I interviewed actually engaged in warfare. I didn’t know that it was that intense. I wasn’t prepared for the number of people that had died during that time. And I found out about how violent that period…the bloodshed, and the people that I interviewed were students. They were children when this happened.” 

Though the work may have been difficult, Bartilow feels it was important – and Bellarmine University, the school where she received her doctorate, agrees, given that it recognized Bartilow with its Dissertation of the Year and Robert and Kathleen Cooter Social Justice Advocate Award. Bartilow said she was honored and humbled to receive the award – and driven to honor the stories that her participants told her.

“The participants are really entrusted in me a lot when they shared those very personal stories,” she said. “I feel as if I have a responsibility to share that.”

Bartilow said that confronting such difficult subject matter had a profound effect on her. The stories were often difficult to hear. 

“I had to check my own mental health,” she said. “While I was interviewing the participants, I started to struggle. with my own mental health. I was having bad dreams, and I could feel the tension and the stress in my body, headaches and trouble sleeping. So I had to just be really mindful about caring for myself as well.”

But Bartilow’s work was ultimately focused on life beyond those difficult stories, on how the people who lived them changed the world in response. She specifically focused on educators who were in school during the apartheid era, and on what they had done to offer today’s students opportunities they had been denied. 

“One of the themes that came through was the need to build up others, support community,” she said. “My participants made the point of telling their students that they need to support others, they need to create a pathway for others to succeed as well.”

That’s ultimately what the Cooter Social Justice Advocate Award celebrates – a dissertation that works towards a more equitable world. Bartilow is joyous that she got the chance to do research that was found worthy of it – and to learn about people pushing past hardship to make the world a better place. 

“It’s about creating positive change,” she said. “Social change and social justice for people who have had extraordinary difficulties, circumstances that limited them and denied them opportunities.”