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When Jamie Tingey was growing up in Southern California, she couldn’t help noticing how different she was from her older sister. They had divergent likes and dislikes and very different relationships with their parents. “Two individuals start in the same place, the same home, the same parents and yet we ended up in very different places on different trajectories,” says Tingey, PhD, post-doctoral fellow at the University of Washington in Seattle. “That’s what first piqued my interest in psychology.”
Tingey majored in psychology at Brigham Young University, where she had received a full scholarship. After graduating in 2011 from BYU in less than four years, she went to work for a nonprofit that ran a wilderness therapy program in Arizona. Her sister had attended the program in her adolescence and the experience had changed her sister profoundly. Tingey wanted to see what the counselors had done. As part of the program, groups of teens, with nothing more than topographic maps, some dried food, a blanket and a compass had to hike as much as 50 miles a day to their next camp, finding water and starting fires to cook without the aid of matches. “If I had really known what was involved, I could never have done it,” she laughs. “I drank out of cow tanks, a puddle of mud. There were some nights when melted snow was our only source of water.”
I adore her because she is such a nice blend of qualities.
Dawn Ehde, PhD
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The teens changed before Tingey’s eyes. “They often came in upset and disengaged. Most of them didn’t know they were going to be there. They didn’t want to learn how to start a fire. But over time, they softened and developed. They gained confidence they could do hard things because they did hard things. It was really cool to see that.” After eight months of roughing it, Tingey was invited by some family friends to accompany them on a trip to India before she planned to begin applying to graduate schools. Two weeks after she returned, she was diagnosed with necrotizing fasciitis on both legs and an arm. She was in the ICU for months, developing pneumonia and being placed on a ventilator. Tingey doesn’t remember the surgeries she underwent to remove the diseased skin and muscle or her tracheostomy, but when she came out of a coma, she couldn’t speak or lift a leg.
Going from a strong healthy young woman to someone who needed others to meet her most basic needs was as traumatic emotionally as it was physically, she remembers: “It was coming to and realizing all that I had lost – that was the real challenge.” She wondered why a mental health professional wasn’t part of her care team. The experience led her to change the direction of the graduate work she wanted to pursue. Tingey chose a relatively new specialty: rehabilitation psychology.
I wanted to stay in an academic medical setting that blends clinical work and research.
Jamie Tingey, PhD
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Tingey attended Seattle Pacific University for her master’s and doctoral degrees in clinical psychology and was able to do practicum work at the University of Washington’s Multiple Sclerosis Rehabilitation and Wellness Research Center. She finished her PhD in 2020 and found a one-year post-doctoral position at Harborview Medical Center where she was able to work in critical care settings. When the year was over, Tingey wanted to do more research and found a two-year post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Washington funded by the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living and Rehabilitation Research. The fellowship is part of a NIDILRR grant to the Center for Rehabilitation Outcomes Research, the research arm of the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab in Chicago. Tingey’s mentor is Dawn Ehde, PhD, a researcher who specializes in rehabilitation medicine, and she was able to stay in Seattle where she has been assisting Ehde with research projects, including one involving using telephone-delivered cognitive behavioral therapy to help control pain for people with disabilities who are employed. (See related article) “I adore her because she is such a nice blend of qualities,” says Ehde. “She is highly professional, warm, even-keeled and a problem solver. She is really curious and adaptable. It’s been fun to see her blossom.”
As her second post-doctoral fellowship wound up, Tingey accepted a job offer from Stanford Medicine in California to be a Clinical Assistant Professor and psychologist in the sleep medicine center. “I wanted to stay in an academic medical setting that blends clinical work and research,” she says. “I intend to continue working with individuals with disabilities and/or chronic health conditions, and they often experience sleep-related disorders. That kind of work is really important to me.”