Edeth Engel: Connecting with People Through Research

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Edeth Engel grew up with a younger brother who was on the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum. It didn’t hold him back in school but he found it hard to make friends. Engel knew he was lonely but there wasn’t much she could do to help so she found ways to help others. In junior high and high school, Engel acted as a peer mentor for people with developmental disabilities, going bowling with them or just talking. In college, she volunteered in a cognition lab working with older adults to see if playing internet games and solving puzzles on computers could slow their cognitive decline. She loved the research process so much that Engel switched her major from chemical engineering to psychology. “I like all facets of psychology but I really like anything to do with research. I like being on the ground level and finding out what people are struggling with,” she says. “You get to learn a lot about their life experience in a way you never would otherwise.”

Later, Engel worked on a study about attitudes toward guns, asking incarcerated prisoners how they obtained their weapons and what they thought about gun policy. Surprisingly, perhaps, many of them felt gun ownership should be more restricted. The prisoners said they had carried their own guns because they felt they were in danger, not because they were planning violence.

After graduating, Engel went to work at a nursing home for people with mental health issues such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorders. While that may sound intimidating to many, she loved it. Engel saw their inner struggles and sympathized: “They usually just need someone to guide them, and they can really thrive on medication.” A search for a new job led her to the Anixter Center in Chicago where she worked as a psychology manager in a group home for people with developmental disabilities.

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That job involved long hours and took her away from research so Engel was thrilled to be hired as a research coordinator at the Center for Rehabilitation Outcomes Research at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab in 2017. One of the projects she is working on involves using motivational interviewing to increase the physical activity of people with Parkinson’s disease. Engel was involved in recruiting people to participate in the study and coding data from focus groups. Another of her projects involves evaluating the same technique to see if it helps patients work harder during their physical therapy sessions. For that study, Engel observes a patients’ therapy sessions and rates their effort. She is “blinded” in the trial so that she doesn’t know who has received the intervention and who hasn’t. “Working with Edeth is truly a pleasure,” says her supervisor, Linda Ehrlich-Jones, Ph.D. “If Edeth does not know how something works, she figures it out. She is not afraid of taking on new responsibilities and challenges.”

Engel’s interest in finding out how things work extends to her personal life as well. She is currently engaged in baking all the tricky “technical challenges” on the “Great British Baking Show.” Engel selects a recipe and then tries it out before she views the episode, putting herself in the position of the bakers on the show who receive only bare-bones instructions to make something they likely have never seen or heard of. She isn’t looking for oohs and ahhs. In fact, Engel only shares her goodies with her husband. It’s really another form of research for her: “I prefer to try it, learn the skill, and then move on.”