Faculty Focus: Stacie Bertram

Dr. Stacie Bertram ’85 joined Bradley’s Department of Physical Therapy faculty in the summer of 1991 as the second full-time faculty member when the program started with a baccalaureate degree. Serving in the capacity of academic coordinator of clinical education for four years, she then transitioned into a full-time teaching position.

Prior to joining Bradley, she taught at Illinois Central College in the PTA program and worked at the Institute of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at Methodist Hospital and Galena Park Nursing Home. She returned to the Peoria area from St. Louis where she worked at Barnes Hospital and taught part time in the physical therapy program at Washington University. It was then that she married Dr. Rob Bertram.

Over the years at Bradley, Stacie has taught many courses in the PT curriculum, including orthopedics, cardiopulmonary, therapeutic exercise, physical agents, and electrotherapy. Currently, she teaches differential diagnosis, electrotherapy, patient examination, women’s health and wound care to the physical therapy doctoral students, and exercise physiology to the undergraduate health science students. She also has taught continuing education courses in differential diagnosis and physical agents in the Peoria area.

Stacie maintains professional memberships in the Illinois Physical Therapy Association, the American Physical Therapy Association sections of Orthopedics and Women’s Health and the American Association of University Professors. Her research interests recently have focused on childhood obesity and the effect on postural control and motor development, physical therapy examination practice patterns and women’s health issues such as osteoporosis and incontinence. Together with colleagues and students she has presented research findings at the local, state and national level, and she has published articles in the Journal of Women’s Health Physical Therapy.

Stacie holds a Bachelor of Science in psychology from Bradley University, a Master of Science in physical therapy from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and a Ph.D. in educational administration and foundations from Illinois State University.

Stacie and Rob have three children, ages 12, 14, and 16, and are active in their church and school as volunteers. When they are not following their active children around, they keep busy by playing in a band that performs at local restaurants and pubs. They also are helping with the new service dog program at Bradley by training a rambunctious golden retriever/yellow lab mix named, appropriately, “Marley”!