ACAPT members recently elected President Mark Reinking, PT, PhD, SCS, ATC, FAPTA, Dean & Professor at Regis University.
Mark has a full plate of responsibilities in Denver, but he finds time when he can for his favorite hobby: bicycling. He and his wife (a Lutheran pastor) also enjoy spending time with their daughter Sarah (a PT in Denver), son Jason, daughter-in-law Ne and grandson Hayden.
Mark's collaborative and strategic strengths will guide ACAPT's development and below is a recap of some of his thoughts:
How did you first get involved with ACAPT and why did you join/what drew you to it?
While I was at St. Louis University (SLU), I was involved in the APTA Academic Administrators SIG in the Education Section. I was invited to be a member of the work group that first created the concept of ACAPT.
I was thrilled when ACAPT was formally approved in 2009 and served as the ACAPT program representative for SLU until I accepted the position of dean of the School of PT at Regis University in 2015. I was elected vice-president of ACAPT in 2015 and served on the board until 2018.
I was drawn to this organization given the mission focused on excellence in physical therapist education and the opportunity to create a unified voice to speak for academic physical therapy.
What are your top priorities with ACAPT?
As president, my top priority is listening to our membership and responding to their issues and concerns. Based on recent membership survey responses, in the next three years my priorities for ACAPT include:
What are the top ways your work has been affected by the pandemic – and how are you/your program adapting?
COVID-19 has had a profound impact on physical therapist education.
- Our faculty have spent countless hours transitioning course materials and teaching strategies to the virtual environment. We have successfully used technology such as VoiceThread in completing remote skills checks.
- Our students have shown amazing flexibility and resilience as their expectations of a ground-based education experience have had to adapt to new methods of teaching and learning.
- Our clinical education team, including faculty and staff, have had to completely reshape our clinical education (CE) program given cancellations and movement of CE experiences in the curriculum. In cases where students have been asked to leave sites because of the pandemic, we have been using simulation software to continue to engage the students in clinical reasoning.
Without question, the world since March 2020 has been all about adapting, pivoting, and rethinking how we best prepare our students. The heroic work of our faculty and staff has been amazing, and we definitely look forward to a brighter future given all we have learned from the experience.
You can reach Mark at president@acapt.org.