ATRA SoCal : 2026 Session Description

Bryan P. McCormick, PhD, CTRS is a scholar, and educator in the fields of recreational therapy, public health, and rehabilitation sciences. He currently serves as Professor in the Department of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences at Temple University, where he teaches graduate courses, mentors students, and leads externally funded research initiatives. With an academic career spanning more than three decades, his work contributes to understanding how leisure, physical activity, and community participation improve health and quality of life, particularly for individuals with disabilities and serious mental illness. Before joining Temple University in 2017, he spent more than twenty years at Indiana University, where he held multiple leadership roles including Professor, Department Chair, Associate Chair for Research and Graduate Education, and Interim Chair of Environmental Health. Dr. McCormick has authored or co-authored numerous books, over 100 refereed journal articles, and dozens of book chapters and technical reports. His scholarship has addressed topics such as loneliness, mental health recovery, physical activity, disability inclusion, and therapeutic recreation practice.

MUSA

Eugene Brusilovskiy has worked in research on community inclusion of individuals with serious mental illnesses for the past 19 years. He is currently the Director of Data Analytics in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, and the Director of the Laboratory on Geography, Mobility and Disability in the College of Public Health at Temple University. His interests and expertise include applying innovative analytical and measurement tools to better understand the predictors and outcomes associated with various types of community participation among individuals with serious mental illnesses. He has served as co-principal investigator, co-investigator, and statistician on multiple federally and state-funded research grants, and has substantial experience managing large-scale studies. He also has expertise in a wide range of statistical and data mining tools, as well as geospatial methods for data analysis.

MA

Medha Saharya, MA (Psychology), is the Community Inclusion Interventionist at the Temple University Collaborative on Community Inclusion. With over seven years of international experience across diverse cultural settings, Medha works at the intersection of mental health, community, and belonging. At Temple, she leads the implementation of the Need To Be Needed intervention—a person-centered approach that supports individuals with psychosocial disabilities in finding avenues for deeper community engagement through the lens of 'mattering'.

PhD, CTRS

Dr. Snethen is the associate director of the Temple University Collaborative on Community Inclusion. Her work focuses on examining factors that impact community participation of individuals with serious mental illnesses (SMI) and developing/testing interventions that facilitate community participation. This work considers how environmental factors such as built social and physical environments facilitate or hinder community participation and resulting health outcomes for adults with SMI.