When the job announcement first popped up in Barb Hooper’s email inbox, she didn’t bother to open it. She was an associate professor at Colorado State, and as director of the Center for Occupational Therapy Education, her focus was on the educational component of occupational therapy. The email announcement was for a position to develop a new occupational therapy program at Duke, and Hooper presumed she wouldn’t be quite what they were looking for.
“I didn’t open it because I just assumed the position would be geared toward a career scientist,” Hooper said. “But someone else I knew opened it and said, ‘Barb, this is written for you.’ It turned out the search committee had crafted the position for an education scholar with my exact background. So I jumped in.”
It turns out she was precisely what Duke was looking for. She got the job, and now, almost three years later, the Occupational Therapy Doctorate (OTD) program Duke, developed under her leadership, is up and running. Duke welcomed the program’s inaugural cohort of 40 students in August 2021.
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