Libby Hladik is an occupational therapist. 
Her work blends clinical expertise with creativity and collaboration. With a background as a theatre director and producer, she brings a unique perspective to her research on well-being and community participation for people with developmental disabilities and their families. In the 2024/2025 academic year, Libby spent a year in the Czech Republic as a Fulbright Scholar, partnering with the Institute for Research in Inclusive Education at Masaryk University in Brno. She worked alongside Czech families to adapt an Accessibility Toolkit for Cultural Institutions, helping to make community spaces more inclusive. Joined by her Czech-born husband and their daughter, Libby reflects, “My Fulbright experience was truly special in how it connected such important parts of my personal and professional life.”
My Fulbright experience was a dream come true. It sounds a little funny and a bit verbose, but it was a combination of personal and professional hopes that came to reality.
I had spent the past seven years as a career-changing adult returning to graduate school. After directing and producing plays in Chicago for over a decade, I discovered the field of occupational therapy and decided to pursue a clinical career. Neither my Czech-born spouse nor I knew we were signing up for such a long academic haul when I started my clinical Master’s degree in Occupational Therapy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
A Master’s degree morphed into a research-focused PhD when I found out how much I enjoyed research (it’s actually quite similar to directing and producing theatre!). There were other major life experiences during that time - a baby and then the pandemic, which limited our ability to travel regularly to the Czech Republic. I hoped somehow, someday, I would find a way to connect my research to opportunities in Europe to spend time near our Czech family.
When this dream came into reality as a Fulbright Post-doctoral Scholar, it was better than I could have imagined. We lived in my spouse’s childhood neighborhood, our child went to 1st grade alongside her cousin in a fully Czech school, and we had countless unique and wonderful experiences through the Fulbright program and with our Czech family and new friends we met along the way, including a surprisingly large number of foreigners married to Czechs now raising their children near Babi/Grandma.
I thought my application to the Fulbright Scholar program for a post-doctoral award was a long shot. My research around inclusion and accessibility for people with developmental disabilities sits between a number of academic disciplines, including my own field of Occupational Therapy. Finding an academic host was complicated due to the differences in the social and medical structures between the United States and the Czech Republic. At an international conference, I had met several occupational therapists working the the Czech Republic. Through connections of connections, I was able to establish a relationship with Integrační centrum Zahrada v Praze 3, a school and social services center that serves children with complex developmental disabilities. After reading many research papers coming out of the Czech Republic around ideas of education and inclusion of children with disabilities, I connected with the Institute for Research in Inclusive Education at Masaryk University. I did actually cold email the authors of a research paper that was aligned with my interests and values, and I couldn’t have asked for a better outcome.
My partners were incredible and likely my most valuable resource for my project. With both partners, I proposed my exploratory research project and how I felt we could work together. My goals were to understand the landscape of inclusion from the perspective of families and service providers, and then to use that information to adapt accessibility self-assessment tools for Czech children’s museums.
Delightfully, my research plan aligned so well with spending a year in the home country of my spouse and exploring Czech culture with our child. We lived in Prague, and I made regular trips to Brno and the Institute of Research in Inclusive Education. Sometimes my family joined me in Brno. I became particularly fond of the train ride between cities where I could work and watch the Czech countryside.
The first phase of my research focused on interviewing parents and service providers (occupational therapists, teachers, ABA providers, etc.) of children with developmental disabilities, primarily through Integrační centrum Zahrada, to understand daily life, school routines, and what it looks like to go to community spaces like museums for kids with and without disabilities. I asked people where they like to go and where they wish they could go, and why. Having these conversations opened up the world of Czech culture, both for my research but also for my personal enjoyment. Very often, I would talk to a parent about their experiences visiting a theatre or museum in their own childhood and now with their child, and then I would take my family there.
In the second phase of my project, I developed relationships with staff members at Czech museums and cultural institutions to inform adaptation tools for self-assessment of inclusions and accessibility for a Czech audience. The tools had been developed in the American context with a children’s museum, so adapting them to work for Czech institutions required not only language translation but also a shifting of cultural context with different systems and perspectives. This work also provided many opportunities for my professional and personal lives to blend as we explored many cultural institutions as a family. Establishing connections with Czech academics, occupational therapists, and cultural institutions has been one of the largest benefits of my Fulbright experience because now I have potential collaborators for future research projects.
Since my Fulbright, I have taken a position as Assistant Professor at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., in the Department of Health, Human Function, and Rehabilitation Sciences in the Occupational Therapy Program. My research in accessibility and inclusion continues and will continue to involve collaborations with my Czech colleagues. In February 2026, I will be presenting the research findings from the interviews as well as an overview of international collaboration between occupational therapists at the World Federation of Occupational Therapists Congress in Bangkok, Thailand. I look forward to seeing how this work grows. In many ways, my Fulbright was planting the seeds for a garden of collaborations.
My Fulbright experience was truly special in how it connected such important parts of my personal and professional life. I think it was particularly unique because no other grant or experience would have allowed me and my family to participate fully in civic life the way we did during this wonderful year. Now we look forward to finding as many opportunities as possible, both for fun and for work, to return to CZ to visit our favorite spots and find new ones. My dedication to understanding the complexities and nuances of accessibility and inclusion for children with developmental disabilities, which has always been both personal and professional, has only grown with the opportunity to explore it deeply from another cultural perspective.