Owen Picton is a certified athletic therapist, a registered orthopaedic technologist, and a health unit coordinator. He works in an inner-city emergency department, in community hospitals, and in the sports medicine community of the Lower Mainland of British Columbia. He has fourteen years’ experience in orthopaedics, sports medicine, and trauma.
He was educated at the University of British Columbia and at Sheridan College, earning a Bachelor of Human Kinetics in 1995. He received his certification as an athletic therapist with the Canadian Athletic Therapists’ Association in 2002. Current highlights of his career include being part of the Vancouver Canadians team that won the Minor League Baseball World Series in 1999, being part of the Canadian National Field Hockey Team support staff from 2008-2012, and being the Head Athletic Therapist for Capilano University from 2014-2015.
He is taking this course because his research and writing skills could use some updating. To illustrate this, he would like to point out that the last paper he handed in to the UBC Department of English could have been hand-written, and that the research for his Bachelor’s degree major paper was executed using microfiche and card catalogues rather than the Internet and search engines.
Academically, his current goal is to earn a Master’s degree so that he can obtain employment at a college or university varsity athletics department as a certified athletic therapist. Another goal is to gain a knowledge base from which to conduct more extensive research within his research interests in order to become an expert in his field.
His research interests include maximizing the efficiency and efficacy of interventions during the “golden hour” of care immediately following traumatic injury, optimizing the recovery from orthopaedic sports-related injury, and devising rehabilitation protocols for people whose injuries are complicated by chronic conditions such as diabetes and chronic kidney disease.
His non-academic interests include playing and watching sports (especially rugby and judo), reading and writing for pleasure, being a great dog-dad to his Pembroke Welsh Corgi (as well as being a great partner to his partner-in-crime), and creating delicious comfort-food meals from the cuisines of all four corners of the Earth. He would love to become addicted to the gym but has not yet done so successfully.
He wishes to give fair warning to his classmates: He IS a grammar Nazi.