Live in Motion names two early-career O&P researchers for its 2026 grants. Here is what the program is trying to build.

The Live in Motion Foundation named Kierra Falbo, PhD, MPO, CPO, and Alexis Sidiropoulos, PhD, as the recipients of its 2026 Early Career Research Grant program, per reporting in The O&P EDGE.

That is the announcement. The more useful context is what the program is actually trying to do, and why a foundation-level grant program for early-career O&P researchers exists at all.

What the Live in Motion Foundation funds

The Live in Motion Foundation is a nonprofit organization focused on prosthetics and orthotics research and education. Early-career research grants are the mechanism it uses to invest in the next generation of O&P researcher-practitioners—the people who might eventually design the clinical trials, build the evidence base, and fill the faculty positions that the field consistently has too few of.

Foundation grants at this level are not transformative in the way that a large NIH center award might be. What they do is different: they give researchers who are still forming their careers funded time and a credential. That matters in a field where independent grant support for early-career O&P investigators is not especially common.

Who the recipients are, and what the credentials signal

Falbo, described as a postdoctoral researcher, holds a PhD and clinical certification in both prosthetics and orthotics (MPO and CPO). That combination is unusual enough to be worth noting.

Most O&P practitioners hold clinical credentials without research training. Most O&P researchers hold research training without clinical credentials. The subset of people who have both represents a relatively small pool, and the subset of that pool pursuing funded postdoctoral research careers is smaller still. The credential structure tells you something about what the grant is trying to support: investigators who can move between clinical practice and inquiry, who understand what questions matter to patients and practitioners, and who have the academic training to pursue those questions in publishable form.

Sidiropoulos, also holding a PhD, was named as the second 2026 recipient. The O&P EDGE’s reporting does not detail their current institutional affiliation or specific research focus—information that would let you track the work downstream.

The pipeline problem these grants are addressing

The O&P field produces fewer PhD-trained researchers per capita than most comparable clinical specialties, and the funding infrastructure for O&P-specific research reflects that. The VA Research and Development program funds prosthetics-relevant work, and NIH funds some O&P-adjacent research when it connects to musculoskeletal or neurological priorities. But dedicated O&P research funding through professional foundations is a smaller ecosystem, and postdoctoral researcher support is a specific gap within it.

That gap has real consequences. Evidence-based practice requires evidence, and generating evidence requires researchers. When a field doesn’t train and retain enough investigators, the clinical evidence base develops slowly, and practitioners remain more dependent on manufacturer-generated data than they would be otherwise. Foundation grant programs are not a structural fix for that problem. They are an intervention at the individual level: fund this researcher, for this period, and increase the probability that they stay in the field and produce something.

Whether that works depends partly on what comes after. Researchers who complete early-career awards and then can’t find stable faculty positions or follow-on funding tend not to stay in research careers. The grant is a starting condition, not a career pathway. The field needs both.

What to watch for

The 2026 recipients’ specific research programs are not described in detail in the announcement. The next useful piece of reporting would be what they are actually investigating—and whether that work eventually reaches clinical publication in a form that practitioners can use. Early-career grants produce papers only some of the time, and papers that change clinical practice even less often than that.

It would also be useful to know more about the program’s track record: how many prior recipients stayed in research careers, how many produced published work that entered clinical discussion, and whether any of it has influenced professional guidelines or coverage policy. The Live in Motion Foundation has not, as of this writing, published that information in a readily accessible form.

For now, two more early-career O&P researchers have funded time to pursue their questions. That is not a solved pipeline. In a field that tends to produce too few of them, it is also not nothing.