Live in Motion is seeking scholarship reviewers. Here is what peer review does for a foundation's programs.

The Live in Motion Foundation is seeking O&P professionals to serve as volunteer reviewers for its Fuel the Future of O&P Scholarships, according to reporting by The O&P EDGE. The foundation relies on professionals from across the field to evaluate applications and help select recipients.

The announcement is short. The question it raises is not.

What peer review does for a scholarship program

A foundation that evaluates all applications internally, with a small board or staff committee, runs into two predictable limits. First, the people doing the evaluating can only bring so much breadth of judgment. O&P spans clinical practice, laboratory research, academia, policy, and administration, and a small group cannot be expert in all of it. An early-career research application reads differently to a bench researcher than to a clinical prosthetist, and both may read it differently than a program director who has watched doctoral students progress.

Second, concentrated decision-making means any biases in that small group go unmoderated. Organizations that run their selection processes through a broader reviewer pool do not eliminate subjectivity, but they distribute it across more vantage points, which tends to produce more defensible decisions.

There is also a practical argument. A foundation running multiple concurrent programs generates more applications than a small committee can evaluate carefully. A volunteer reviewer corps scales evaluation capacity without adding paid staff. That matters for a nonprofit foundation whose operational overhead affects how much of its budget goes to the programs themselves.

What the call implies about program volume

Live in Motion awarded multiple distinct grants in 2026. The Early Career Research Grants went to Kierra Falbo and Alexis Sidiropoulos; Brian Hafner received a $30,000 Pilot Research Grant; Adrienne Hill received the Educate to Elevate Scholarship. Three separate instruments, each with different evaluation criteria, each generating a separate applicant pool.

A reviewer corps large enough to handle that volume, without relying on the same people to review everything across programs, requires real breadth. The fact that the foundation is publicly recruiting reviewers suggests existing capacity is not enough for what the programs are generating. That is generally a good sign: more applicants means more awareness of the programs and more competition for a limited number of awards, which is what you want in a functioning grant program.

It also adds administrative complexity. Running a peer review process well requires coordination: managing reviewer assignments, handling conflicts of interest, setting evaluation rubrics, aggregating scores. These are solvable problems, but they are problems.

What it does not resolve

The question raised in prior coverage of Live in Motion’s 2026 awards remains open: the foundation has not published outcome tracking for prior recipients in a form that is publicly accessible. That is a different kind of quality control than selection-side peer review. You can build a rigorous process for choosing who gets funded. That is separate from tracking where recipients go and whether the investment achieved the outcomes the program was designed to support.

A foundation that is building reviewer infrastructure is doing program development. A foundation that is also tracking outcomes is doing program evaluation. The two are compatible; so far only one is publicly visible in Live in Motion’s operation.

For O&P professionals considering the role

Volunteer reviewing is real work. It involves careful reading of applications, familiarity with the type of work being evaluated, and enough distance from the applicant pool to review without conflict of interest. It takes time, and the amount of time is rarely trivial once you account for reading, scoring, and any discussion process that follows.

The Live in Motion Foundation is the direct contact for professionals interested in participating. The O&P EDGE reporting on the call points to the foundation directly for details about the process, time commitment, and eligibility.

If you are an O&P clinician, researcher, or educator who works in or near the types of programs Live in Motion funds, and you can review without a conflict, this is a reasonable way to contribute to how the field allocates its limited development resources. It is also worth asking, before you agree, what the review process actually looks like.

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Amputee News does not provide individualized academic, career, or program advice. Prior coverage of Live in Motion Foundation 2026 awards is linked within this piece.