Holly Stants

Holly Stants is an award-winning occupational therapist and clinical interventionist with expertise in functional outcomes measurement, quality improvement, and low-vision intervention for people with blindness and low vision and other comorbid conditions. She also creates low-vision educational content for learning opportunities for staff, universities, and local and international conferences.

Stants also has extensive experience as an occupational therapy practice leader and quality improvement project leader in the long-term care, inpatient rehabilitation, and outpatient settings, including the low-vision rehabilitation setting.

Stants received her BS in occupational therapy from the University of Pittsburgh and MS with an emphasis in low vision from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). Stants holds nationally recognized specialty certificates in low vision from the American Occupational Therapy Association and Academy for Certification of Vision Rehabilitation & Education Professionals, as well UAB’s graduate certificate in low vision rehabilitation. She is also a recipient of the 2021 UPMC Senior Services Community Provider Services People’s Choice Award for her leadership in the advancement of low-vision telerehabilitation, as well as the Pennsylvania Occupational Therapy Association Award of Recognition for her work with the PennDOT medical review board on developing the bioptic driving practice.

Stants is the low-vision rehab team leader in UPMC’s Vision and Rehabilitation Institute. With her expertise in low-vision rehabilitation, she partners with many principal investigators in the Pittsburgh Low Vision Research Collaborative and serves as an interventionist in research studies involving vision restoration technologies or electronic digital head-mounted magnification systems to improve visual performance or functional vision in participants with moderate to profound vision loss (e.g., end-stage age-related macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa).

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