Body
Kevin Fearn grew up in a hardworking, middle-class family in Springfield, Ohio. His father worked at an International Harvester factory while his mother worked as a secretary and later managed a nearby apartment building. Even though he worked every day after school at his mother’s building, Fearn was a top student at his high school and member of the National Honor Society. It made sense that he would end up at nearby Ohio State University, a sprawling university with more than 40,000 students. But unbeknownst to him, a high school guidance counselor applied on his behalf to DePauw University, a small private school in rural Indiana, which offered him a scholarship.
Fearn decamped to the Hoosier State in 1978 where he discovered a passion for psychology in his sophomore year. Fearn loved learning about how the human mind works and solves problems. He was also intrigued by the emerging field of computer science, another type of information processing. Even though he didn’t see himself becoming a clinical psychologist, Fearn changed his major to psychology and took enough programming classes to minor in computer science. He decided to pursue a master’s in experimental psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
There Fearn worked in a lab of a visiting professor doing memory experiments. Every desk in the lab had its own Apple II computer, which was state of the art at the time, and Fearn was doing the programming to run the experiments. After finishing his master’s degree, he thought about applying to a PhD program but decided he wanted to use his research skills right away. Fearn landed a position at the National Safety Council in Chicago, the nation’s oldest nonprofit safety advocate group best known for its work to reduce traffic fatalities and other types of preventable death and injuries.
During his tenure at the NSC, Fearn managed a data collection system that recorded monthly motor vehicle fatalities reported by each state. He used that data to come up with monthly fatality estimates as well as those for big travel times such as Thanksgiving and Christmas, and the NSC then made recommendations to reduce those numbers. Fearn loved working on a variety of research and statistical projects and met his wife at the council where she was an editor. The couple started a family and moved to the western suburbs of Chicago, not far from where the safety council relocated in 1992.
When the COVID pandemic hit in 2020, the National Safety Council reorganized and downsized, and Fearn’s position was eliminated. “Being laid off during the height of the pandemic was challenging,” he concedes. After many months of job searching, Fearn heard about an opening at the Center for Rehabilitation Outcomes Research (CROR) at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab. CROR was looking for someone to manage its Rehabilitation Measures Database (RMD), which contains almost 600 instruments that help clinicians measure everything from their patients’ mobility to their executive function.
Fearn was hired by CROR in 2023 and now oversees the RMD. That includes coordinating with universities that have students writing summaries of new measurement instruments for the website. He also tracks down answers to questions from database users about things like how to score a particular instrument. “It’s been fabulous,” Fearn says. “The people at CROR are a great group of people, and helping users find the information they need is very similar to a lot of the work we did at the safety council.”
Fearn’s supervisor, Linda Ehrlich-Jones, RN, PhD, notes that Fearn is extremely detail-oriented and tenacious about tracking down information. “Kevin is a committed employee who goes above and beyond. If he doesn’t know the answer to a question, he will find it,” says Ehrlich-Jones. “We are so glad that Kevin is part of the CROR team!”