Body
When Erin Walaszek was finishing high school in Chicago in the late 1990s, she became intrigued by the emerging field of sports medicine. Growing up in the working-class town of Oak Lawn, she had always been athletic and played multiple sports. She also saw how much satisfaction her mother took in her work as a nurse in a nearby hospital.
Searching for college options, she was struck by a program at Marquette University in Wisconsin that allowed people to major in physical therapy (PT) from their freshman year and then go directly into a PT graduate program. “I got there and I never wanted to change. School was very hard. I was jealous of my friends at other colleges who could take bowling classes for credit,” Walaszek says with a laugh. In addition to her studies, Walaszek always worked multiple jobs and would waitress at a restaurant near her home when she was on breaks.
Walaszek, 44, describes herself as an average student until she did her clinical work at a Minneapolis hospital. Then she hit her stride: “I fell in love with doing bedside PT with patients at the hospital. I loved the medicine side of it, the complexity of that. You had to know what the patients were on, what procedures they had had. I also loved the team aspect of it.”
She went on to get her Doctorate in Physical Therapy (DPT) from Marquette in 2006. Her first job out of school was at Rush University Medical Center, a teaching hospital in Chicago, where she worked in a large state-of-the-art orthopedic department. After a short stint in Baltimore as a traveling physical therapist, Walaszek returned home to Chicago and went to work on the cardiac floor at Northwestern Memorial Hospital where she developed a specialty working with patients experiencing heart failure.
For years, these patients weren’t thought to be good candidates for PT because of their weakened condition but Walaszek discovered she could work with them and show them ways to exercise safely. “If folks know they have that condition early on, there’s a lot they can do for it,” she says. “They can really make gains, and there’s evidence to support that.”
In 2015 Walaszek took a job at the nearby Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, which would become known as Shirley Ryan AbilityLab. Within two years, she was the clinical manager of the Strength + Endurance Lab. There, she met a speech therapist who worked with brain injury patients. The two of them teamed up to conduct a small research study of people with spinal cord injuries to see if respiratory muscle training could improve the patients’ ability to swallow and speak. “I loved being able to look at a clinical question and actively do something to figure out the answer,” she says. “That opened me up to research.”
She was also trying to figure out her work-life balance. Married to a nurse practitioner and with two young daughters, Walaszek decided to step back from her manager role and take a part-time role at the Center for Rehabilitation Outcomes Research (CROR) at Shirley Ryan AbilityLab in 2022. She is now involved in two CROR research projects. One is an external study through Northwestern University evaluating an intensive exercise protocol for heart failure patients after they leave the hospital. For the second project, Walaszek is helping recruit 300 participants for an eight-week online health and wellbeing program, called MENTOR, targeted at people with mobility issues.
"Erin is such a fantastic person to work with,” says CROR assistant director Alex Wong, PhD, DPhil. “She has a knack for providing insightful suggestions and she is always eager to help others. Having her on the team really boosts collaboration and creates a supportive atmosphere."