Meet the Fit & Strong! Management Team

Dr. Susan (Sue) Hughes is Professor Emerita in the School of Public Health and was the Founding Director of the Center for Research on Health and Aging at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Her research focuses on the design and testing of evidence-based health promotion programs for older adults. She has conducted six multi-site randomized trials of interventions with funding from NIH, CDC, the Veterans Administration and major foundations.

Sue worked with an interdisciplinary team to design and test the Fit & Strong! (F&S) exercise/behavior change program for older adults with osteoarthritis (OA). Her prior work found that disability from arthritis is substantially more pronounced among people who have OA in their lower extremity joints. F&S targets this group. The program has demonstrated significant improvements in multiple measures of lower extremity joint function and pain, including functional performance measures. Decreased mobility is an independent risk factor for mortality. We know that walking speed declines with age; F&S reverses this trend in a group that is very high risk for these adverse outcomes.

Sue has also served as Principal Investigator of UIC’s Midwest Roybal Center for Health Promotion and Translation that has been funded five consecutive times by the National Institute on Aging. The pilot funding provided by the Roybal Center has stimulated research on aging broadly across many Departments and Schools at UIC. She has served on many national advisory committees, including the Institute of Medicine, NIH, the Administration on Aging, and CDC, served as a National Mentor to the Hartford Geriatric Social Work Scholar program for many years and is a founding Board Member of the Evidence Based Leadership Collaborative.

Sue is a graduate of Girls’ Latin School (Boston), Manhattanville College (BA), Simmons College (MS) and Columbia University (PhD in Social Policy and Planning in Health).

Andrew DeMott is a Research Specialist in the Institute for Health Research and Policy at the University of Illinois Chicago. He coordinates UIC’s Center for Research on Health and Aging and is the National Manager of the Fit & Strong! program.

Information coming soon

Dr. Gail Huber is a health services researcher and educator. Her research focuses on physical activity interventions and community based participatory research. She has experience as a co-investigator on health services research grants funded by NIH/NIA and has received funding as a PI thru the NU-Alliance for Research in Chicago Communities (ARCC). She is an active co-investigator on an RO1 (Dr. Susan Hughes, PI). As part of the Fit & Strong! team she has been actively involved in training instructors to deliver this evidence based program all over the country.  Dr. Huber believes that community based programs are part of the continuum of care needed to address the population of older adults with osteoarthritis. In addition, she has become increasingly interested in access to care and community based interventions relevant to the field of Physical Therapy. Finally, she has committed a significant proportion of her efforts over the years towards mentoring and training doctor of physical therapy students.

Dr. Huber’s other relevant experiences include: invited participant to American Physical Therapy Association Innovation 2.0 workshop as a health services researcher; member of the Alliance for Research in Chicago Communities steering committee; and service as Chair of Illinois Physical Therapy Association, Health Promotion & Wellness Task force.

Gerald Stapleton has held leadership roles in the field of education since the 1970s having first been appointed as a middle school principal in 1975 after 7 years of teaching in the public schools of northern Indiana and earning a Master of Science in Educational Administration from Purdue University. After additional studies in educational leadership at Purdue and serving as a principal in a private school in Hinsdale, Illinois, Mr. Stapleton took on leadership roles in corporate training where he was regional manager for training operations for two national retail organizations.

In 1999, Mr. Stapleton joined the Department of Medical Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s College of Medicine and took on the challenge of creating an online Core Curriculum intended to prepare UIC’s medical residents to meet the general competencies requirements established by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME). The program was recognized by the Sloan Consortium as the most outstanding online program in 2002 and was adopted by more than 25 Graduate Medical Education programs across the country from New York to Hawaii with a total enrollment over 18 years of more than 15,000 residents.

As Director for Distance Education and Faculty Associate in the UIC COM Department of Medical Education, Mr. Stapleton also guided the development of numerous other educational programs at all levels of the health professions education continuum dealing with such topics as environmental medicine, geriatrics, patient safety, quality improvement, health policy, global studies, and telemedicine. Mr. Stapleton has been at the forefront of research and application of cutting edge educational methodologies such as the use of web-based learning, video conferencing, simulation, virtual patients, active learning, and virtual reality in the design of courses for health professionals.  Over the past ten years, Mr. Stapleton has had the privilege of working with Dr. Hughes and the members of the Fit & Strong! administrative team to expand participation in the program through the use of enhanced educational technologies.

Mr. Stapleton has pursued advanced studies in curriculum with a focus on the health professions and has taught graduate level courses in the Master of Health Professions Education (MHPE) program at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). His research interests are centered on the teaching and evaluation of medical professionalism and the use of serious games for learning. Mr. Stapleton has presented his research at both national and international forums and in several medical education journals.  Other professional activities have included leadership roles in the Society for Simulation in Healthcare (SSH) and the Academy for Professionalism in Health Care (APHC).