Sally Wasmuth, PhD, MA, OTR

Sally Wasmuth, PhD, MA, OTR, received her PhD in critical and philosophical studies of biology from the University of Exeter in 2012. She has also received a master of arts degree in philosophy of biology (2007) and a master of science degree in occupational therapy (2011), and completed a 2-year postdoctoral training at the Roudebush Veterans Administration Medical Center in Indianapolis, Indiana. She is currently assistant professor in the Department of Occupational Therapy at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Dr. Wasmuth has been conducting research on the neurobiology of addiction and the bidirectional relationships between addiction and human occupation since 2006, and has published several papers on the subject in the Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment, the American, British, and Canadian Journals of Occupational Therapy, and the Journal of Occupational Science. She has coauthored papers on mental health employee burnout and integrated dual disorder treatment (IDDT) implementation and has been the principal or co-investigator on several related grants. Dr. Wasmuth has published her own theoretical model of addiction and piloted an occupation-based treatment approach to facilitate community engagement in people recovering from addiction. She recently was the recipient of a $750,000.00 Community Foundation Grant to further implement and study this intervention model. Dr. Wasmuth has taught mental health to doctoral- and master’s-level occupational therapy students since 2013 and has been an invited guest lecturer for several universities and organizations including the University of Southern California and the Psychosocial Occupational Therapy Action Coalition (POTAC) in San Francisco. She was the invited plenary speaker at the International Institute on the Model of Human Occupation (MOHO), where she discussed the concept of addiction-as-occupation, and has presented her work at several AOTA annual and specialty conferences.