Credentials
Background
Dr. Gross studies the prevention of disability in people with physical and mental health disorders. This includes investigating the effectiveness of clinical and public health interventions, the validity of clinical decision support and other assessment tools, as well as factors associated with disability. He has given numerous national and international presentations and published over 100 peer-reviewed articles.
Dr. Gross is Director of the Rehabilitation Research Centre (RRC).
Dr. Gross is a Senior Associate Editor with the Journal of Occupational Rehabilitation.
2018 'Great Supervisor' Award recipient from the University of Alberta's Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research.
2017 Award for Research Excellence at the Safe, Healthy, and Productive Workplaces Conference: Learning from Research and Practice. Canadian Institute for the Relief of Pain and Disability. June 1-3, 2017, Vancouver, British Columbia.
An orientation to the unique features of rehabilitation science that impact on research methodology, design, ethical issues, measurement, and statistical analyses. Issues such as chronicity of disease, low incidence of specific conditions resulting in small sample sizes, small increments of change over long periods of time, ordinal data, wide variability in patient characteristics, group data versus single subject data, etc. will be studied in terms of appropriate research design, measurement, and analyses.
Winter Term 2021Mass media campaigns have been used to educate the general public on how to manage low back pain. Dr. Gross and collaborators evaluate these campaigns as well as other public health initiatives to determine their impact on beliefs about back pain and related behaviours including, work disability, and the use of health care resources.
Various performance and self-report tests are used by clinicians to inform return-to-work decision making for injured workers. Dr. Gross is working to evaluate commonly used assessment tools and develop innovative tools to improve clinical decision making.
Dr. Gross and collaborators are working to develop and evaluate the effectiveness of novel interventions and research methodologies related to work disability prevention. He is also develop more accurate clinical decision-support tools for return to work.