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effectively support patients through combined physical and music-based treatment, as well as assess student attitudes and readiness to conduct interdisciplinary work. “Our collaboration organically focused on problems we saw while in our clinical roles,” O’Malley explains. “Supporting our students’ need to learn interdisciplinary skills required for successful professional careers in our respective disciplines requires experience during their clinical rotations at URI and the hands-on experiential time to learn collaborative communication.” Clarkin adds, “By training our students early on, we embed the expectation that solutions come more readily when we work together as a team. Once they see the impact that their teamwork has on positive client/patient outcomes, they are more open to continue to practice and adopt this mindset.” O’Malley says she is buoyed by the ‘a-ha’ moments her students share, and knows their contributions are crucial to improving evidence-based practices for music therapists in the future. “There was one moment while observing the inter professional collaboration last semester when my music therapy students jumped into helping a patient,” she says. “The physical therapy students were like, ‘wait, look what is happening!’ They fed off each other.” Although finding ways to bring her research to already existing programs across campus is the ultimate goal for O’Malley’s newly established lab, she says she misses the rewarding experience of treating patients across the state with the neurobiological benefits of music therapy directly.

clinic today, too hard, she would say, ‘You’re fired, Ms. Nicole, you’re fired,’ says O’Malley. “She struggled with certain tasks, but when I changed from speaking to singing my instruction, things would just click. “This work is intense and there are cases that stick with me, but when I’m doing something like songwriting with a patient and seeing the connection to their mental and emotional health, those moments fill me up.”

NICOLE O’MALLEY

Assistant Professor Music

“Music feeds us, just listening to a song we like turns our reward circuits on, circuits that help with a lot of other skills.”

Developing a strong base of practitioners in Rhode Island remains in the nascent stages, starting with legislation adopted in 2014 by Gov. Gina Raimondo, recognizing music therapists as official health professionals through the Rhode Island Department of Health. O’Malley led the state’s task force for writing that legislation. Now, O’Malley is working on publishing her first manuscript about assessing the impact of

collaboration among physical and music therapy students through the URI Physical Therapy Department’s Parkinson’s Exercise Program (PEG) with Assistant Professor Clarkin. Led by physical therapy doctoral students, PEG is a community-based exercise program for Rhode Island residents diagnosed with the neurodegenerative disorder.

- Nicole O’Malley

The research examines how these collaborations

“When I pushed my first client, who is still with our

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