VCU Professor Receives Award for Disability Discrimination Research

By Sathya Achia Abraham

Brian T. McMahon, Ph.D., a professor in Virginia Commonwealth University's Department of Rehabilitation Counseling, and his colleagues have received the Kevin Karr Innovative Rehabilitation System of the Year Award for 2007.

The annual award, sponsored through the International Association of Rehabilitation Professionals, IARP, is presented to an individual or group that has made considerable strides in the advancement of rehabilitation systems available to people with disabilities.

McMahon and his colleagues were selected for their contributions to the National Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Americans with Disabilities Act Research Project. This project, housed at VCU, was designed to address disability discrimination in the workplace.

Since 2003, McMahon, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and 50 rehabilitation researchers from 12 universities, have worked to profile more than 369,000 allegations of workplace discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Through rigorous database development and mining, researchers have been better able to define, document and understand workplace disability discrimination.

"We put this virus (workplace discrimination) under a microscope in order to understand it so that over time we can eliminate it entirely from the social fabric of our society," said McMahon. "This is social justice research at its best."

Researchers are nominated by IARP members, and then are selected by an Awards Committee. The award was presented at the IARP Annual Conference on May 16, in Los Angeles.

McMahon is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and past president of the American Rehabilitation Counseling Association as well as recipient of its Career Research Award. The concept for the project was developed while he was a Distinguished Research Fellow at the National Institute of Disability and Rehabilitation Research during a sabbatical from VCU in 2004-2005.

The research was funded by the National Institute of Disability and Rehabilitation Research through a grant to VCU and the National Network of ADA Resource Centers.