CAHS Hires Program Director for Graduate Occupational Therapy Program

The University of Cincinnati (UC) College of Allied Health Sciences (CAHS) announced the hiring of Steven Wheeler, PhD, to lead the master of occupational therapy (MOT) program in the Department of Rehabilitation Sciences. As program director, Wheeler will help the program begin the process of formal accreditation through the American Council for Accreditation in Occupational Therapy Education (ACOTE).

"The interest in bringing occupational therapy to UC is tremendous and adding the program is the perfect complement to the high quality professional degrees currently awarded in the College of Allied Health Sciences,” says Wheeler, adding that while optimistic about UC’s occupational therapy (OT) accreditation efforts, the process is a long and very involved one. "ACOTE initial accreditation for developing programs is essentially a three-year process. We’re off to a great start thanks to Dean Whalen and her team who developed a framework for innovative model for OT program delivery which was approved by the Ohio Board of Regents.”  

Wheeler brings 25 years of experience to UC, the last 15 of which were spent in the role of associate chair of OT at West Virginia University’s School of Medicine. Prior to that, Wheeler served as OT program director at Shawnee State University in Portsmouth, Ohio. During this period, Wheeler participated in four ACOTE accreditation self-studies and on-site visits, a process that will be his primary focus as UC gets its OT program off the ground. 

In addition to his experience in academic administration, Wheeler has an extensive clinical service and scholarly background. He is co-author of the American Occupational Therapy Association’s Occupational Therapy Practice Guidelines for Adults with Traumatic Brain Injury and was the 2016 recipient of the West Virginia University Injury Control Research Center’s Excellence in Teaching Faculty Award. He completed his doctorate in health related sciences at Virginia Commonwealth University, earned a MEd in applied psychology from the University of Toronto and a BSc (OT) from the University of Western Ontario.

With the hiring of a program director and submission of a letter of intent now complete, Wheeler will start the one-year process of obtaining program candidacy. Once ACOTE approval is given, UC will be able to formally recruit and accept students into the program and hire faculty. The first class of UC OT students would then begin the MOT program in the summer of 2018, with an ACOTE accreditation team coming to UC for the onsite evaluation to complete the process in August or September of 2019. If the UC program meets all of its ACOTE deadlines, the first class of students would graduate with MOT degrees in 2020.