Body
When Bishan “Melody” Yang was growing up in Jiangmen, China, in the late 1990s, her father was a talented and hard-working music teacher. But when she was 12, her world turned upside down after her father was diagnosed with a brain tumor that was lodged between his cerebellum and brain stem. The surgery to remove it left his cognitive abilities intact, but her father lost almost all his ability to function physically. “He became totally dependent,” Yang remembers. “It was really hard for him.” Yang’s mother became her father’s round-the-clock caregiver. When her father needed to go to medical appointments, her mother carried him and his wheelchair up and down six flights of stairs in their apartment building.
Watching her father receive rehabilitation therapy convinced Yang that was the career she wanted to pursue. She attended the Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine in China in 2013 for an undergraduate degree in Rehabilitation Therapy and then applied and was accepted to a master’s degree program in occupational therapy at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska.
Coming to the U.S. was a bigger shock than Yang expected. She thought her English skills would be serviceable because she had been learning English since elementary school. What she didn’t have was practice in real-life conversations, and that became clear as soon as she stepped off the plane and tried to find her luggage. In general, she says, “I became super quiet. I was a very extroverted person in China but coming here changed my personality. I had to find my confidence again through small things.” One thing that really helped her was working as a barista in a campus Starbucks. “As soon as I started taking orders, my spoken English improved quite a bit.” Yang was grateful for all the support and encouragement she received at school and she quickly regained her confidence: “Studying and living in the U.S. has been both eye-opening and mind-opening, constantly offering me new perspectives.”
Now that she was older, Yang often reflected on her earlier life and realized her father could have had a totally different life if he had access to simple things like a power wheelchair and an elevator or a first-floor apartment. “I realized that for all those years, he experienced a world of barriers,” she says. “That’s what got me interested in looking into the effects of environmental barriers on people’s everyday lives. There are a lot of things we need to work on to ensure that all people have the right to participate in society.” Yang decided to become an advocate for community access for people with disabilities in addition to working as an occupational therapist.
Yang’s original plan had been to return to China as an occupational therapist, but she decided to stay in the U.S. and apply to PhD programs. Some of her professors warned her that she might not be ready, but Yang applied anyway and was delighted when she was accepted at the University of Washington in Seattle, one of the nation’s top schools in rehabilitation science. Yang’s first year coincided with the Covid pandemic and even though attendance was fully remote in 2020, she finished her doctorate in a whirlwind of four years. “I found out I love research and would love to become a researcher,” she says.
Yang knew she needed more experience to become a principal investigator so when she heard about a post-doctoral fellowship program at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, she was very interested. The program, which is funded by the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR), assigns each fellow mentors and emphasizes the mechanics of research and grant writing with the goal of preparing them for a career in health services research. Fellows are also expected to apply for their own grants during the two-year program. That means that they often move on to their next position with a funding source already in place. “That’s very different from working on other people’s projects,” says Yang, 30, who became a fellow in 2024. “They want you to develop independence and leadership skills.”
One of Yang’s mentors is Allen Heinemann, PhD, Director of CROR. Yang is contributing to a study of employers’ experience and perspectives in hiring people with physical disabilities and a second study comparing rehabilitation lengths of stay across the US, Canada, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Australia. “Melody is a wonderful contributor to our team’s efforts,” said Heinemann. “She brings attention to detail, an inquisitive mind, and readiness to contribute her expertise.” She recently submitted a Mary Switzer Fellowship application to the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research in collaboration with staff at Thresholds, an agency that serves Chicagoans with mental illness.
During her fellowship, Yang is working to engage more people in the disability community in research with the goal of becoming an independent rehabilitation and disability researcher specializing in community-based participatory research. Yang’s mentor at the University of Washington, Danbi Lee, PhD, OTD, OTR/L, – a graduate of Yang’s fellowship program – is confident she will become an outstanding researcher. “She’s awesome,” says Lee. “On the scholarly side, she is very goal-oriented and directed. She is also very passionate about working with the disability community. She engages and works with people with disabilities because she values their voices and experiences. It’s been a pleasure to see her grow.”