Denise Drane has a clinical background in speech and language pathology. Denise worked for a few years as a clinician, mainly with patients who had suffered strokes and traumatic brain injury and also worked as a research officer in a specialist traumatic brain injury unit in Sydney, Australia, where she is from. After completing her master’s degree in public health, she worked on several projects on infant feeding and how this affects the health and development of children. Denise has worked in higher education on improving teaching and student learning at Northwestern University for the last 20 years. During this time, she also worked as an adjunct faculty member at Northwestern in Communication Sciences and Disorders and the Feinberg School of Medicine. She loved horses as a child but didn’t have the opportunity to learn to ride or own a horse. Denise began taking riding lessons in her mid-forties and got her own horse, Clancy, soon after. She still has Clancy and 3 rescue horses, Hope, Banjo and Pippi. Denise has served as a Board Member for BraveHearts Therapeutic and Educational Center in Illinois since 2013.
“I have seen horses transform peoples’ lives and have experienced this myself. I don’t think that it would be an overstatement to describe some of the transformations that I have witnessed as miraculous. I am passionate about gathering robust research evidence on horse-human interactions so that our expertise in equine assisted therapies grows and so that equine assisted activities can be made available to everyone who needs them.”