Graduate and launch a business: UTC occupational therapy students do both

From left: Max Fuller Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship Director Mike Bradshaw, Launch Tennessee’s Jennifer Skjellum, 2025 occupational theraphy graduate Katelyn Henderson and Occupational Therapy Doctoral Capstone Coordinator Erin Melhorn.

Every spring, occupational therapy students at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga enter their final semester with a single directive: identify a challenge people face and fix it.

It’s the essence of occupational therapy, a field dedicated to helping people build or regain the skills needed for daily life after an injury, illness or other life change.

“If students have evidence to support an idea, we give them the flexibility to explore it,” said Dr. Erin Melhorn, who oversees the OT doctoral capstones at UTC. “Sometimes that becomes research, sometimes a new tool, a business or even a model for delivering care.”

====================================================================

The UTC Occupational Therapy doctorate program fall 2026 application cycle is now open. The deadline is Wednesday, Oct. 1, 2025.

====================================================================

The last semester of the doctoral program is devoted entirely to the capstone: 560 hours—about eight hours a day, five days a week—focused on solving a practical OT-related problem of their choosing. Unlike a dissertation, the OTD capstone emphasizes advanced clinical practice, leadership and evidence-based solutions over purely academic research.

For some OT students, that mission leads beyond graduation, as classroom prototypes evolve into products and therapists become entrepreneurs.

Katelyn Henderson is one of them. The May 2025 graduate is both working as an OT and developing a product that evolved from her capstone project. With help from the Max Fuller Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the Gary W. Rollins College of Business, she refined her business strategy and started product development while finishing her doctoral degree.

During her clinical rotations, Henderson observed patients struggling with oversized, unrealistic OT props on site, which were intended to mimic daily tasks such as carrying groceries or opening pill bottles.

“Seeing clients struggle with tools that didn’t feel realistic made me think there has to be a better way to do this,” Henderson said.

That’s when she created the OT Closet, a portable, organized kit that combines more realistic—but still therapeutic—household items and simple, inventive tools that help clients work on daily skills more effectively.

She participated in the Fly! Mocs Business Pitch Competition a year before starting her capstone and placed third.

Sponsored by the Max Fuller Center, the contest helps students, faculty and staff turn their ideas into market-ready products and services.

Building on her experience in the pitch competition, Henderson continued developing the OT Closet as her doctoral capstone—the profession’s counterpart to a Ph.D. dissertation.

That work evolved into PriOriTizing Function, a startup-in-the-making designed to help therapists run more effective, real-world rehab sessions.

“Katelyn already had a strong concept, so we focused on the business side—like pricing and distribution—and how clinics might actually buy it,” said Jennifer Skjellum, former UTC commercialization counselor and a member of Henderson’s capstone committee.

That meant thinking beyond one large product to include individual tools that clinics could purchase separately and items they would need again and again, explained Skjellum, now with Launch Tennessee—a statewide entrepreneurship and innovation organization.

“People immediately saw the potential,” Skjellum said.

Dr. Thomas Lyons, the Clarence E. Harris Chair of Excellence in Entrepreneurship and executive director of the center, said that bringing entrepreneurial thinking into health care “can create impact you can see right away with patients, in clinics and in the wider community.”

“When students have the time and resources to explore an idea,” Lyons said, “they often take it further than anyone expected.”

Not all entrepreneurial ventures are physical products.

Mia Lawson, a May 2025 graduate, used her OT capstone to design a service model for postpartum clients in underserved communities.

The idea grew from her 14-week clinical rotation with the national Nurse-Family Partnership site at Erlanger, where she sat in on home visits and heard new mothers describe feeling overwhelmed, isolated and unable to manage daily routines.

“I remember one mom telling me just getting from her bedroom to the living room felt like a huge deal,” Lawson said. “I wanted to create something that met people where they are with tools that made sense for their actual lives.”

Her solution was a digital manual for in-home visits that blends occupational therapy strategies, activities and techniques with screening tools for anxiety and depression.

The digital manual focuses on building routines, managing sensory overload, reframing negative thoughts and connecting clients to resources. Lawson copyrighted it, presented it for her doctoral capstone, and is now in talks with Nurse-Family Partnership’s national office to make it a standard resource for nurses.

“I’d love to see it out there being used,” she said, “and if that means others reproduce it, that’s perfectly fine. As long as it reaches the moms it was made for and I’m credited, that’s all I really want.”

The American Occupational Therapy Association increasingly emphasizes innovation and entrepreneurship as key to advancing the profession.

At UTC, Melhorn said, the doctoral capstone reflects that shift.

“Occupational therapy and entrepreneurship both start with the same question: what problem needs solving?” she said. “When students apply that mindset, they can create solutions that reach far beyond the clinic, and that’s the kind of impact that lasts.”