Michele is the Co-founder of the Cerebral Palsy Research Network and its Director of Education and Community Engagement. She developed the well known and beloved CP Tool Kit for which she received the “Making a Difference” award from AACPDM, the professional society for cerebral palsy. In this resource Michele wanted to offer her vision of what she would have liked to receive when she was told her daughter had cerebral palsy, something offering reliable and practical information delivered in a supportive context.
The CP Toolkit was a groundbreaking resource for the CP community and it has been downloaded by people and clinics around the globe in English, Spanish and Portuguese. It is available in digital format through the CP Research Network website: https://cprn.org/our-toolkits/ and is available in print and for purchase through Amazon.com https://www.amazon.com/Cerebral-Palsy-Tool-Kit-Understanding/dp/1523496614/. Since the development of the CP Tool Kit, Michele has also led the development of other CP resources including a wellbeing guide for caregivers, a toolkit developed for dystonia in CP, and coming in June 2025 is the long awaited Adult CP Toolkit. Michele is passionate about developing community resources to empower people with CP and their families, and help them to begin discussions with their medical teams about their health and wellbeing.
In addition to her passion for creating educational content, Michele also enjoys serving as a liaison between community members and clinician researchers in order to help them work together and understand each other’s concerns. The recent term “co-production” in research codifies what to Michele was a natural inclination to have consumers, clinicians and researchers talking and working together to advance research for cerebral palsy.
