"My name is Kayela Robertson. I am a graduate student in my fifth year in the clinical psychology
program, specializing in neuropsychology. My research focuses on a lot of different
areas. One of those is conducted at St. Luke's Rehabilitation Institute in Spokane where
there is a simulated community in a hospital setting, and so the simulated community is
like, a little grocery store facade, a hotel facade, all these sorts of things to simulate
the real world community within this hospital or as people with things like tramatic brain
injuries, strokes, spinal cord injuries come into their hospital. They use this community
environment to help rehabilitate people so they can transition back to the community
appropriately. And so part of my research there is just looking at this community to
test whether people can perform an everyday activity such as grocery shopping within the
simulated community.
I'm from Spokane Washington. So my mom was an auto paint detailer and my dad was a car
salesman, so I took a little bit of a different route there. When I was learning a little
bit more about psychology in high school, that was kind of my first exposure to it.
My grandmother actually had a stroke, she had what we call an aphasia, the specific
type of aphasia resulted in her inability to produce speech, so she could no longer
talk, and so as she recovered from that stroke I got to see the recovery process firsthand.
I visited her at the hospital that I actually do research at now, St. Luke's and I saw what
the different professionals that worked at the hospital like the speech therapist, physical
therapist, neuropsychologist, the doctors all kind of played a role.
You know as I learned more, especially going into like undergraduate and learning more
about psychology and research in general, understanding that, you know, there's current
researchers right now trying to work on bettering people's rehabilitation experience, improving
their chance of recovery, that sort of thing that really was interesting to me and to know
that I could potentially have a hand in that process is what kind of fueled my passion
to go further in the field.
So this is the night owl test. So we're using this currently for our brain health study.
Some of the short term goals is really to develop different assessment tools, to try
to figure out, you know, where people's memory and thinking abilities are at as well as how
those are really impacting their everyday lives and the whole idea of why we want to
collect this information, why this is important to us is to really figure out how we can then
use that information to impact their everyday lives. You know for me most of the research
that we do is very collaborative, so we're usually working with people in our lab or
in other labs, because we do a lot of work with like the computer scientists and engineers
that sort of thing.
And then for the sort of stuff that I do specifically. It's really working hands on with participants
which sometimes they're, you know, the best part of my day, because you get to, you know,
see these people, they really want to you know learn new information, ask you questions
to really better their lives and so for me I actually get a lot of human contact because
of that and just working one on one with participants or in a group setting.
I would say the big goal is for the people that we work with with these different neurological
conditions to be able to fully recover and to be able to fully function independently
and on their own and be able to regain some of their life that they feel like they lost
with either the diagnosis of some certain disease or their, their injury of their brain.
I would say if you're interested in the sciences and something's caught your attention, just
go for it and don't fight your passion. I actually was really resistant about going
into the field of psychology mainly because I knew it would take me like 10 plus years
of college, so it might seem intimidating to go on these different tracks that have,
you know that they take a while, just forget about all of that, because me being in my
fifth year of graduate school and going into my tenth year of college. It's something that
went by so quickly, especially in graduate school where you're doing stuff that's very
applicable to what you want to do. Just don't fight it, just go for it."