Faculty Research Areas
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Muscle physiology, muscle adaptation to mechanical loading, cellular basis of muscle function in health and disease. |
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Research interests directed towards understanding healthy and pathological neuromuscular control. Specifically interested in sensori-motor challenges in hand function and understanding how neurological pathology changes how people use their hands. Investigating neural changes due to aging, traumatic brain injury, and neuropathy affect functional hand use, particularly in actions of daily living. |
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Research has focused on family-related factors, such as poverty and family structure, and their influence food insecurity and food assistance program participation and how family-related factors and participation in public assistance programs influence child and adult health outcomes. |
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Development of human coordination, investigation of locomotion/posture control and the role of somatosensory input on muscle contraction. |
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Develop effective obesity prevention interventions that target psychosocial mediators to mitigate the impact of the obesigenic environment and the natural rewarding properties of food on the individual among families in the earliest years of development. Related to these ultimate research goals are identifying 1) mediators to overeating, 2) effective behavior change strategies, and 3) valid/reliable measures of these variables. |
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Examining how exercise and stress affect the immune system in young and aged subjects. Current research examines the role of regulatory T cells and how exercise-training can alter their suppressive ability. How the musculoskeletal system can be maintained and even enhanced throughout the lifespan with resistance training, animal and environmental physiology, and how different individuals and species adapt to wildly varying climates and conditions. |
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Metabolic diseases, metabolism, and nutrition. |
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Evaluation of subject-level outcomes and effects; measurement of health, health-related quality of life, and health-related behaviors; measurement error, validity, linear models, and latent variable models. |
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Understanding normal and abnormal sensory-motor control of balance and locomotion. Studying and modeling the biomechanics, neural control, and adaptive responses of this system to space flight, aging, injury, and disease, other manifestations of altered sensory-motor control. Multi-system physiological adaptations to acute and/or chronic changes in gravito-inertial loading. Using rotational inertial loading (artificial gravity) to alleviate effects of physiological deconditioning caused by long-term exposure to microgravity. |
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Effects of exercise, age and disease on immune function. Physiological demands and performance indicators of soldier load-carriage performance. |
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Neuromuscular physiology and motor learning; Biomechanics and gait analysis; Electrical stimulation of paralyzed muscles to restore function; Rehabilitation engineering; Pathological locomotion. |