Jessica Hoyle, PhD, MMT, MT-BC, is a postdoctoral fellow at the Lurie Institute for Disability Policy.
Jessica began her career as a music therapist and served adults and older adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities for over a decade before returning to graduate school. As a music therapist and public health researcher, Jessica is interested in how social relationships influence the health and well-being of people with disabilities. Her current research seeks to understand how people with disabilities experience social capital across the life course. She earned her PhD in public health sciences and a graduate certificate in gerontology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She defended her dissertation, titled "Social Capital and Developmental Disabilities: Interdependence to Promote Health," in the summer of 2023. In her dissertation, she used qualitative and quantitative research methods to examine aspects of the question, How do people with developmental disabilities experience social capital from childhood to young adulthood? Her prior research explored the experience of social capital among college students with disabilities and used nationally representative data to examine the transition to adulthood of individuals with developmental disabilities and lifetime health outcomes for individuals with disabilities in childhood.