Rocky Mountain College OTD Faculty Member Receives National Research Award for Storytelling Study
Billings, Montana — Dr. Randi Johnson Hanson, PP-OTD, OTR/L, a faculty member in Rocky Mountain College’s Occupational Therapy Doctorate program, has received the 2026 Mary J. Bridle First Research Award from Pi Theta Epsilon, the national occupational therapy honor society. The $2,500 annual award recognizes Hanson’s study, “The Occupation of Storytelling: Sharing of Collective Gifts.”
The Mary J. Bridle Award carries real weight in the occupational therapy research community. It’s reserved for Pi Theta Epsilon members conducting their first formal research project in the field, and it comes with more than funding. Recipients have their manuscript reviewed by experts in occupational therapy research and are considered for publication in OTJR: Occupational Therapy Journal of Research — one of the field’s leading peer-reviewed journals. That combination of financial support and a direct line to publication is what makes the award a meaningful marker of a researcher’s early work.
The list of past recipients reflects that standard. Cortney Leverentz of Creighton University won in 2024 for a telehealth pilot study aimed at improving occupational performance in older adults. Sarah Synek, also of Creighton, was recognized in 2023 for a systematic review examining upper extremity orthotic interventions for stroke patients. In 2022, Clarissa Stanhope of Rush University in Chicago received the award for research on accessible tourism and disability advocacy. And in 2021, Keri Kamphoff of the University of South Dakota was honored for work addressing quality-of-life issues for people living with lymphedema. Hanson’s 2026 receipt places Rocky Mountain College’s Occupational Therapy Doctorate program alongside Creighton, Rush, and the University of South Dakota in the award’s recipient history — institutions with established, well-known OT research programs.
Hanson’s research asked a question that hadn’t been fully answered in the occupational therapy literature: why do people choose storytelling as an occupation, and what do they actually get from it? Working with three professional storytellers recruited from storytelling events in Wisconsin, Hanson conducted semi-structured interviews and analyzed the transcripts for recurring patterns. Three themes emerged. Storytelling builds connection between the storyteller, the audience, and mentors. It creates space for emotional and physical expression, including the act of getting into character. And it demands a deliberate creative process, one storytellers keep training and refining over time.
The findings reinforce something occupational therapists already understand intuitively but rarely see studied directly: storytelling is not just entertainment. It’s a purposeful, therapeutic occupation that supports identity, self-esteem, and well-being, both for the individual telling the story and for the community receiving it.
“I wanted to look at an occupation that doesn’t get much research attention, even though almost every culture has practiced it for generations,” Hanson said. “Storytelling turned out to be exactly what you’d hope an occupation would be: something that connects people to each other and to themselves.”
Dr. Corwin Sutherin, Program Director of Rocky Mountain College’s Occupational Therapy Doctorate program, said the award reflects something the department has come to expect from its faculty. “Randi’s project is exactly the kind of research we want our faculty pursuing: curious, a little unexpected, and grounded in a real clinical question. She noticed a gap nobody else had studied and went and did the work to fill it. That’s the standard we hold ourselves to here, and it’s the same standard our students get to learn from every day.”
Hanson’s award adds to a growing list of research coming out of Rocky Mountain College’s Occupational Therapy Doctorate program, based in Billings, Montana. The program has built its reputation on faculty who stay active researchers and practitioners, not just instructors, giving students in the university’s OTD program direct exposure to original scholarship as it’s happening rather than secondhand through a textbook.
