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For third-year graduate student Nico Pierides, enrolling in UNLV’s occupational therapy doctorate program was a full circle moment.

Pierides, who grew up in the Philippines, witnessed the benefits of occupational therapy firsthand. In seventh grade, he befriended a shy and nearly nonverbal transfer student in his class — fast forward to graduation, and his friend had transformed into a social butterfly.  

When Pierides asked his friend what helped him improve, the friend said he had been working with an occupational therapist. “My first reaction was, ‘what’s that?’ It was my first time ever hearing of that job,” Pierides said. 

Then, in 2018 he learned that the School of Integrated Health Sciences was developing an occupational therapy program. He knew he had to apply. 

“I told myself, let's try, — let's try to be that change for a certain individual, just like for my friend back in high school,” Pierides said.

When people hear of occupational therapy, they — like Pierides initially — may not know what it entails. Occupational therapists assess and create interventions for patients to help them develop, recover, or maintain meaningful activities or occupations. This can include aiding children with disabilities to participate fully in school, helping people recovering from injury to regain motor skills, and providing support for older adults experiencing physical and cognitive changes.

UNLV’s three-year occupational therapy doctorate program trains future therapists in a “real home” setting in a converted house in the Las Vegas Medical District. They learn how to help their future patients with everyday tasks like doing laundry or safely navigating a kitchen with adaptive tools.

Combined with the experiential coursework, students also begin fieldwork assignments in their first year to make a difference in the community, faster. The program is topped off with a community capstone project of their own design.

The Hazards of Esports

Pierides developed his capstone project, an ergonomic protocol for UNLV’s esports teams, by combining his fieldwork experience doing hand therapy at a local outpatient clinic with his passion as a gamer. The protocol will serve as a resource for players in the esports field to help them prevent injuries. Pierides understood the need for an esports ergonomic protocol; he himself suffered from a numb wrist as a result of long hours of gaming.

“When professional players go into the field they don't get an ergonomic trainer. When your hand starts going numb, your reaction time starts getting slower. A 0.5- or 0.25-second delay in the middle of a game makes the biggest difference for a win or loss. If your reaction time from those injuries affect you to that point, you could end up losing,“ Pierides said.

“Maybe five years down the road, or even less depending on how much you play and compete, these seemingly common injuries can lead to surgery, a decrease in your quality of life, or even end your career. These are things I want to prevent by making small changes through this ergonomic protocol.” 

Pierides has made connections all throughout the Southern Nevada community to kickstart his project — working closely with UNLV’s Overwatch 2 esports team, local esports professionals, and the Black Fire Innovation esports arena in southwest Las Vegas.

Some guidelines in his ergonomic protocol apply to anyone who regularly uses a computer: Assess your posture, fix your shoulders, keep your back straight, adjust your hands appropriately, and move your forearm on appropriate surfaces.

But, a key element in his ergonomic protocol is focused on how to adjust postures, exercises, and movements to each individual esports player. 

“That is one thing that I love about occupational therapy — knowing the person inside and out and identifying what's important to them. You need to know the position they're most comfortable with and how to work around that to optimize performance and reduce injury.”

The protocols in Pierides’ capstone project, while specific to esports players, reflect a core theme that is foundational to the field. “The challenge, but also the beauty of occupational therapy is trying to find ways to make an intervention more meaningful to the patient,” Pierides said. “You have to figure out ways to treat your patient and find what works for them. That's why I loved my fieldwork because I got to experience working with patients, and I never used the same thing for every patient that I had. I never had a cookie cutter treatment.” 

“Every patient will come to you with a certain diagnosis. Even if the diagnoses are the same, there's always going to be a different way to treat the patient. They come to you to get better. And if you want to improve that process of getting better, you need to make it meaningful for them.”

Pierides will graduate from the occupational therapy doctorate program this summer, but his main focus is solely on his capstone project for now. And he’s not worried about landing a job after graduation; like many students enrolled in the occupational therapy program, he has already received several job offers. 

Looking to the future, Pierides said, “I want to be the change for someone's life to help them become better so that one day they'll look back and hopefully they can do something similar to pass it on.”