I am a clinician by training who values helping patients recover from injury and/or surgery to regain mobility and function and ultimately enhance their quality of life. I enjoy working with patients with orthopedic conditions across the lifespan from pediatrics to geriatrics. I am passionate about health equity, ensuring that underserved communities have access to competent and compassionate care. I strive to reduce disparities in healthcare outcomes by offering accessible services for all.
This passion for the profession first led me to clinical teaching with DPT students then classroom teaching. I have a similar passion for my teaching responsibilities as I do clinical care. I aim to create a warm and engaging learning environment that challenges students to think critically and grow in their clinical reasoning. Just as I individualize care for patients, I strive to meet students where they are and support their development into thoughtful, evidence-informed practitioners.

Jackson Roush, PhD, is Professor in the Division of Speech and Hearing Sciences and Section Head for Audiology at the Carolina Institute for Developmental Disabilities (CIDD). With funding from the U.S. Maternal and Child Health Bureau and from the US Department of Education, he directs two training grants designed to prepare graduate students in audiology and speech-language pathology to work with children who are deaf or hard of hearing with autism and other developmental disabilities.

Dr. Roush has been an audiologist for 40 years and has published and presented extensively on a variety of topics related to newborn hearing screening, diagnosis, and intervention for children who are deaf or hard of hearing including those with co-occurring conditions.  He is actively involved in several state and national organizations committed to improving early identification of hearing loss, and he currently serves as Co-Chair of the EHDI Advisory Board for North Carolina.

Dr. Roush is an ASHA Fellow, a Fellow of the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute, a 2007 recipient of the Presidential Award from the American Academy of Audiology, and a 2019 recipient of the CIDD Impact Award for outstanding contributions in the field of intellectual and developmental disabilities.

My research has focused on improving health care services, function, and participation for adults with cerebral palsy. My participation in an international investigator group allows me to combine the data I have gathered on secondary conditions within a small cohort of adults with CP with other international databases with similar variables so that we can make significant contributions to the literature. These results will lead to the development of more efficacious interventions to allow adults with CP to be as functional as possible for as long as possible. Equally important, these cross-sectional, and eventually longitudinal, data will assist in developing prevention programs that will better predict adult outcomes for individuals with CP and their families and eventually be instrumental in the development of programs to prevent secondary conditions.

I am also involved in health services research, utilizing large data to identify longitudinal patterns of health care utilization for adults with CP diagnosed with specific musculoskeletal conditions.

Learn more about my current research by watching this video from UNC Research.