Category: Health and Kinesiology

Hot wheels: A stationary track for mice could lead to breakthrough

July 24, 2024 | Darina Lubenov

Diego Hernández-Saavedra is focused on studying exercise memory

From left to right, Hank Huang, Diego Hernández-Saavedra, and Clay Weidenhamer. (Photo provided)

The sight of mice scurrying across the kitchen floor is usually the stuff of our nightmares. But in the lab of Department of Health and Kinesiology Assistant Professor Diego Hernández-Saavedra, running mice indicates progress.

Hernández-Saavedra in 2024 received a $30,000 grant from the Center on Health, Aging and Disability, or CHAD, to study muscle memory. He and his team decided to focus on mice.

“Mice love running. They run like five to 10 kilometers [about 3-6 miles] per night, so a lot. What our studies are trying to do is trying to leverage the fact that mice love running and try to understand whether we can make them healthier,” Hernández-Saavedra said. 
     
The grant Hernández-Saavedra received was part of the CHAD Pilot Grant Program. That program was enabled to support innovative, groundbreaking interdisciplinary research aimed at advancing the understanding of health and wellness, aging disability and the maintenance of a high quality of life.  

According to Hernández-Saavedra, in the initial training phase, mice are trained for four weeks. With this group, researchers try to answer the question of how muscle memory is established. 

In the second phase, mice train, followed by a detraining period where all mice are sedentary. This group tackles the question of whether the muscle memory disappears after exercise cessation. 

In the final training phase, mice are trained, detrained, and once again trained. This cohort answers the question of how prior muscle memory is remembered and recalled by a second exercise training bout, Hernández-Saavedra said.

“We’re limited by doing mouse work, but I think it’s very interesting because we don’t really know how muscle memory works,” he said. “The grant that we received is to study how each cell within the muscle stores the memory and contributes to a better outcome.”

Hernández-Saavedra, born and raised in Mexico, came to the U.S. in 2013 to pursue a Ph.D. at Illinois after receiving his B.S. from the Autonomous University of Queretaro, Mexico. After his Ph.D., he went to The Ohio State University as a postdoctoral fellow in 2018 and returned to Illinois to become a faculty member in 2021.

Hernández-Saavedra’s research focuses on the beneficial effects of exercise to understand the adaptations in key metabolites and lipids in health and disease, the epigenetic mechanisms associated exercise that improve metabolism and bioenergetics, and the transgenerational effect of sedentarism and exercise on metabolism and cardiac function. 

In his post-doctorate work at Ohio State, Hernández-Saavedra studied how maternal obesity can affect the health of babies. Now at Illinois, Hernández-Saavedra is more focused on studying exercise memory, which is understanding whether the body remembers it ever exercised. 

“What our lab is trying to understand is whether our bodies remember prior exercise. For example, if you worked out, in the past, you’ve gone to the gym, but then you don’t go anymore. Four months later, you go back to the gym,” Hernández-Saavedra said. “Do we start from scratch? Do we start from a middle point? Or do they just remember all that and recover really fast to make it stronger, faster and better.”

Hernández-Saavedra explained that his lab studies how the tissue, the muscle, or the liver or the heart, remember prior exercise and how they store information in an epigenetic memory.

“Our research aims to reveal how exercise shapes muscle memory, providing strategies to combat age-related muscle decline, enhance metabolic health and maintain health and mobility as we age,” Hernández-Saavedra said.

For their studies, various groups of mice undergo different exercise training cycles. Some constantly work out, other groups do, but then stop and others workout, stop, and resume again. 

“We use a very interesting strategy,” said Hernández-Saavedra, who credited his students Hank Huang and Clay Weidenhamer for their “tireless” work on the project. “The mice love to work out so we train them. Then we have another group where we train those mice, and then we remove the wheel. And then we see whether the mice, their tissues, specifically the muscle, whether they forget that they ever ran in a wheel.

“They love getting on the wheel,” Hernandez-Saavedra said about the mice. “They love their exercise. And so maybe we should try to be like them a little bit.”

 

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For Health and Kinesiology’s Askow, a heavy lift is no burden

July 09, 2024 | Darina Lubenov

Six-time weightlifing champion Andy Askow is pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Illinois (Photo provided)

To anyone who knows Andy Askow, the marrying of his personal interests and research interests is no surprise.

The Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Health and Kinesiology is a six-time national powerlifting champion. He’s also planning to defend his dissertation in the fall and graduate from the College of Applied Health Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in December.

Askow’s dissertation is focused on a randomized controlled trial aiming to understand the role of dietary protein distribution throughout the day and dietary protein source on daily muscle protein synthetic rates throughout a nine-day intervention.

“We can’t look at nutrition without working with the exercise component as well,” said Askow, whose advisor is HK Associate Professor Nick Burd. “Certainly, it cradles a holistic approach to research and setting up to research and setting up the experiments.”

Askow came to Illinois in 2019 after completing his master’s degree in exercise physiology and sport science at Texas Christian University. Before that, he completed his bachelor’s degree in kinesiology and exercise science at University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. 

While at TCU, Askow—a Wisconsin native—came to Illinois for the summer to work as a research associate. During that time, he found he wanted to return to the Midwest for his Ph.D., and found a perfect fit in Burd’s Nutrition and Exercise Performance Group.

“We have an interest in trying to identify innovative approaches to promote muscle health across the lifespan,” Askow said. “And every day is complete chaos. It’s really inconsistent, but it’s a fun inconsistent. It doesn’t get stale, because nothing’s ever the same.”

Burd agreed.

“It’s always exciting,” Burd said. “Andy and I were just sitting here for a few hours this morning, trying to figure out some data sets. And I literally told him, ‘This is where you earned your Ph.D.’ It’s fun, being a critical thinker, and being in the trenches in terms of answering the questions, generating that cutting edge information and then sharing it with other people.”

In addition to carrying his course load and his workouts, Askow has also made time for awards. He’s won four scholarships, most recently the Laura J. Huelster Award in spring 2024.

“Being a Ph.D. student, there aren’t a lot of opportunities for external confirmation that you’re doing things the right way. Winning these awards has been a nice reminder that hard work pays off and that I’m on the right path.” 

As for future plans, Askow has been collaborating with Dr. Andrew Jagim, the director of Sports Medicine Research at the Mayo Clinic in Wisconsin, and hopes to return there after graduation.

As much mentorship as he offers, Burd knows that students, especially doctoral students, have to be self-starters.

“I’m just there to help them stay afloat and steer them in the right direction, but they’re really doing it on their own,” Burd said. “They’re just very self-driven. I’m there to help create a positive learning environment for him and help culture those passions and foster those passions.”

“The people that have been here have been some of my closest friends and collaborators,” Askow said. “I think you can’t get through a Ph.D. without having a good group around you or, it’s certainly not going to be very nice if you try.”

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Even in retirement, Synthia Sydnor stays connected to kinesiology

July 03, 2024 | Ethan Simmons

With her unique scholarly background, Synthia Sydnor has provided a humanities-trained perspective within the department for three decades

Retired Health and Kinesiology Associate Professor Synthia Sydnor smiles outside of the Siebel Center for Design. (Photo by Ethan Simmons)

As a wandering graduate student, Synthia Sydnor used to take cross-country road trips while she worked on her Ph.D. at Penn State University. 
 
In 1986, an opportunity came calling from the College of Applied Life Sciences at the University of Illinois: an opening for a faculty position to study and interpret sport and play. 
 
The role seemed a perfect match for Sydnor—a budding scholar in the cultural-historical analysis of sport—but this Midwestern setting seemed unappealing.
 
Driving through the “barren” winter landscape of Illinois, “we always said, ‘this is the last place on earth we will ever live,’” Sydnor said. 
 
Two years later, the job was still open, so Sydnor applied to at least get some interview experience. To her surprise, Illinois hired her. Sydnor came to adore the university as well as Illinois’ prairies and skies, and she would retire from the Department of Kinesiology and Community Health in spring 2024, 36 years later. 
 
Sydnor has witnessed profound changes in her discipline and in the University of Illinois, from researching and writing in a basically pre-digital academic environment to teaching a 750-student online class before COVID-19 had even arrived. (Leading KIN 142: “Contemporary Issues in Sport” virtually felt like “running a corporation,” she said.) 
 
With her unique scholarly background—she held appointments in the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory and Illinois Global Institute—Sydnor has provided a humanities-trained perspective within the department for three decades. 
 
“What is sport? Why do we attach all these invented things to it, like ‘masculinity’, ‘teamwork,’ and lately, ‘peace’ and ‘development?’” Sydnor said. “I’ve tried with students and the research I’ve contributed to think of sport as a serious object of knowledge, not just frills and fun.”
 
In retirement, Sydnor is spending time with family while staying connected to her academic home, collaborating with several younger faculty across the department and mining her own discipline for new insights. Her humor, friendliness and mentorship of graduate students leave a distinct legacy. 
 
“She was always willing to take on a student in need of help—she had a soft spot in her heart for graduate students,” said Kim Graber, head of the renamed Department of Health and Kinesiology. “If they were experiencing challenges or difficulties, if they were not sure what they wanted to study, she’d always lend a helping hand, and be the person to listen to their concerns, and take them under her wing.” 

A changing field 

Sydnor left her mark on her department in more ways than one. The large triptych painting by Illinois alumna Brett Eaton and posters that line the first floor of Louise Freer Hall, celebrating the female pioneers of the field, are based on Eaton and 50 other undergraduates’ archival research in Sydnor’s course “Sport in Modern Society.”

The exhibit, “An Untold Story: U of I Female Faculty in the History of American Athletics and Sports Scholarship at the University of Illinois,” was funded by the Illinois Ethnography of the University Initiative and Illinois Gender Equity Council after Sydnor applied for them. 

“So many alums will walk up and down the halls during visits and really appreciate the art because they bring memories back for them,” said Graber, who joined Illinois six years after Sydnor.
 
Sydnor always took pride in teaching popular classes, which were often highly rated in student reviews. It’s especially rewarding when former students reach back out to discuss a class concept that clicked for them years later, she said. 
 
She also taught experimental courses, like one focused on extreme sport, to lead students into important topics of culture and theory. The class used a book she co-edited with Robert Rinehart, “To the Extreme: Alternative Sports, Inside and Out,” as a basis for study.
 
“What I do doesn’t predict or control, it doesn’t necessarily ‘solve’ something,” she said.  “Instead, you converse. ‘What does it mean to be human in different times and places? In different bodies?’ I’ve tried to contribute that to my classes, my teaching, my research.” 
 
As a physical education undergraduate at the University of Delaware, Sydnor was interested in cultural studies as well as sport, having played both lacrosse and field hockey. Sydnor continued her academic track at the University of Washington, where she obtained her master’s degree, and Pennsylvania State University for her doctorate in Interdisciplinary Humanities.  

With her rare combination of research interests, Sydnor had accepted the idea of becoming an independent scholar. 

I’ve loved being part of Illinois because of those leaders who had forethought and courage to pioneer new ideas.

Synthia Sydnor

Retired HK faculty member

“I thought that what I was doing contributed to knowledge, but I didn’t know if any university would ever hire me. And that was OK.” Her experience in ancient Greek language and cultural studies laid a framework for a scholarly niche missing in kinesiology. When she arrived at Illinois in 1988, the field of kinesiology was widening its umbrella. 
 
At the time, Illinois’ Kinesiology department head Karl Newell had begun hiring an “amalgamation” of exciting, cross-discipline scholars, Sydnor said. The department had changed its name from “physical education” to “kinesiology” the year before, and Newell was pushing for other departments across the world to follow suit. 
 
Sydnor even wrote an article with Newell about the historical development of the word “kinesiology,” rooted in the Greek term “kinesis.” They argued that the term was broad enough to hold multiple disciplines of movement and would have plenty of staying power. 
 
She admires the developments of each of the three department heads she’s worked with—such as Wojtek Chodzko’s push to focus on healthy aging, and Graber’s empowerment of younger faculty. 
 
“I’ve loved being part of Illinois because of those leaders who had forethought and courage to pioneer new ideas, and we’re on the cusp of that now with changing to ‘Health and Kinesiology,’” Sydnor said. “I love our department and how much it’s grown, and how much Kim Graber has let the new young professors lead us in research initiatives.”
 
In retirement, she’ll continue working with Health and Kinesiology Teaching Assistant Professors Caitlin Clarke and Jesse Couture to develop a student textbook, essentially a second edition of her 2021 book “Social Theory for Sport Lovers.”
 
She’s hoping to finish up her two books of her own: One that explicates new aspects of sport and its futures, and another in reception studies, focusing on how ancient motifs and symbols live on in physical culture in new ways that past civilizations would not comprehend. 
 
“I feel so fortunate, I’ve just loved it here,” Sydnor said. “It enabled my creativity, it enabled collaboration with great thinkers across campus and hopefully helped students approach sport in a learned way in their professional and personal lives.”

Editor’s note:

To reach Ethan Simmons, email ecsimmon@illinois.edu.
 

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Fresh legs carry on the Lifetime Fitness Program

May 06, 2024 | Ethan Simmons

The Lifetime Fitness Program sports an eight-decade history at the University of Illinois of helping adults ages 55 and older stay fit

Members of the Lifetime Fitness Program swing medicine balls overhead for an upper body exercise. Classes in the spring and fall terms are hosted at the Campus Recreation Center East in Urbana. (Photo provided)

It’s 7:30 a.m. at Campus Recreation Center East on the campus of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Charmaine Young swings a 10-pound exercise ball around her head before lowering to the exercise mat for a “Superman” pose, which works her back muscles. 

Young is 86 years old, but you’d never guess it based on how she moves in the Lifetime Fitness Program, the five-day-a-week group exercise class run by the Department of Kinesiology and Community Health. She’s been returning to the class each semester for nearly 38 years. 

“I live alone, and outside of a log or a tree limb, I can pick up whatever I need,” Young said. “The [Lifetime Fitness Program] is such a part of me, it’s hard to take it apart.” 

The Lifetime Fitness Program, “LFP” for short, sports an eight-decade history at the University of Illinois of helping adults ages 55 and older stay fit, while supporting the college’s research goals. 

The program recently changed hands after longtime KCH Professor Ken Wilund, who ran LFP for more than a decade, left for the University of Arizona. 

But Lifetime Fitness quickly found fresh legs under it, with two first-year faculty at the College of Applied Health Sciences at the helm: KCH Assistant Professors Jack Senefeld and Emerson Sebastião. 

“[Wilund] was looking for someone else to sort of liven up the program,” Senefeld said. “He asked Emerson and I if we would be involved, and we both excitedly said yes.” 

Of course, the program didn’t just “fall in their laps,” Sebastião said. Both faculty have research bona fides in exercise science, especially for older adults. 

What they’ve quickly discovered is a fitness group brimming with devotees, many of whom have been coming back to the weekday classes for decades. And there’s room for more. 

“COVID was not a fun time for society, and a lot of community-based, physical activity-based programs had really dwindling communities,” Senefeld said. “Our goal has been to promote the program and increase the number of people that know about it, because the people who know about it, love it.” 

While the pair of faculty members administer the program and oversee its research, the 7 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. weekday classes are run by undergraduate students for class credit and supervised by graduate students Ashley Morgan and Kaitlyn Pawelczyk. Sebastião, like Wilund before him, still attends a couple of sessions each week. 

“Having this close connection, being able to work with the older adults, it’s good to be around them. It’s fun—it helps me in other areas as well,” he said. “Talking about building community, I think it’s important to be there, show our faces.” 

LFP is a community unto itself. Each class radiates positivity, even in those early mornings. 

“That’s an awesome part of the Lifetime Fitness Program, the social, community aspect of it. Not even just for the members, it’s even been like that for me,” said Pawelczyk, a first-year grad student coordinator for the program studying Nutritional Sciences. “Everyone is so supportive, caring, invested in each other’s lives from an exercise standpoint and from an intentional standpoint. Everyone wants to know how everyone is doing and support them.” 

A reservoir for research 

The year was 2009, and Sandy Goss Lucas had recently retired from the University of Illinois, where she directed the Introductory Psychology curriculum. A friend of hers tipped her off to a study in kinesiology, researching whether women’s weight was better controlled through diet or exercise, and Lucas decided to join. 

She was put on the exercise track and found out that the regimen increased the participants’ bone density, among other positive things, she said. For her participation, she got a small payment and a free semester of the Lifetime Fitness Program. 

“We were intersecting with people who were doing Lifetime Fitness anyway, so I went to see what it was all about,” she said. “And I got hooked.” 

The friendly atmosphere, challenging exercises, and “phenomenal” student instructors immediately appealed to her. Lucas, now 74, has been coming back for the past 15 years. 

“It’s just been one of the best experiences of my life,” she said. 

Having this close connection, being able to work with the older adults, it’s good to be around them.

Emerson Sebastião

HK assistant professor

Many of Lucas’ classmates found the class in the same way, after going through a research study in the college. That’s intentional: Many KCH faculty are interested in recruiting older adults for exercise studies, but after the study elapses, older adults might not have a place to stay in touch, Sebastião said. 

“This program also serves that purpose—to have a place to go after research studies are done, and then they can be integrated with that group and then start building their community and keep exercising, which is the main focus,” he said. “We want them to be long-term exercisers, not just for 12 weeks, which is normally how a study would last.”   

The exercise is “vigorous,” according to 20-year LFP attendee Fran Hacker, who said the regular activity helped her recovery from cancer. 

“When we’re off a week or two, I can notice the difference,” she said. 
But the program’s different classes—stretches in the morning, strength work, water aerobics and yoga—are designed to be functional, instructors said. 

“You want to tailor the program to the fact that they are older adults. We want to be careful of balance, of the knees, obviously, but we want to make it fun,” Pawelczyk said. 

The next frontier for the professors is getting new research elements off the ground, Senefeld said. Many of the adults who keep coming back to Lifetime Fitness are interested in their health; Senefeld and Sebastião are planning to implement regular assessments on various fitness metrics, from strength and aerobic capacity to walking speed. 

“They’re really interested to know if they’re slowing down, and so we can help them quantify that and provide that feedback and then use that to look at how does physical exercise benefit older adults,” Senefeld said. 

The Lifetime Fitness team recently published a program overview in Kinesiology Review, running through the structure of the program, its physical benefits for older adults and experiential learning for the student instructors. 

The group’s social ties have kept the cohort going strong, even through the COVID-19 pandemic. When classes were canceled in early 2020, a group of exercisers began meeting at West Side Park for spaced-out, masked-up outdoor yoga. The tradition of meeting on weekends has kept up ever since, said Mike Sims, an 11-year participant in LFP. 

“We text each other and meet on Saturdays and sometimes go out for coffee and watch movies after that,” Sims said. “The [social aspect] opens up a whole atmosphere bigger than just exercising.” 

Just three weeks after a knee replacement surgery, Lucas was back in class stretching with the rest of the cohort. Her classmates and the student instructors were, as always, ready to welcome her back. 

“We’re a very close group, right now we have people going through breast cancer, ovarian cancer, chemo. People have gone through all kinds of things, we take a meal, we stay in touch, we check up on each other,” she said. 

“I just feel very, very strongly that this group has kept me sane.”

(Members of the Lifetime Fitness Program pay $30 a month for full membership. Summer classes run until August 11, MWF from 8-9 a.m. at Freer Hall. Fall classes will resume Monday-Friday at CRCE on August 28). 
 

Editor’s note:

To reach Ethan Simmons, email ecsimmon@illinois.edu.
 

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Yogi, OT, teacher, researcher: Kinesiology Ph.D. candidate explores yoga for pain management

April 01, 2024 | Ethan Simmons

The question that guides her research: How might yoga be used to manage chronic pain?

Stephanie Voss poses outside of Freer Hall.

To doctoral candidate Stephanie Voss, chronic pain treatment and yoga have more in common than we think. 

Voss, now in her third year of a kinesiology Ph.D program at the University of Illinois, first came across the connection while working as an occupational therapist at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab, a rehabilitation research hospital in Chicago. 

While she consulted patients who were dealing with persistent, chronic pain, Voss was training to become a yoga instructor—an out-of-class hobby that helped her overcome her own studying-induced back pain. 

“I couldn’t get over how similar the treatment approaches are,” Voss said. “Yoga is very much a holistic practice, and we address chronic pain in very much a similar way—it involves working as part of an interdisciplinary team on strength and muscle conditioning and posture and body mechanics. We also work on the psychological components, the emotional components and how we can integrate pain management strategies into daily life.” 

Today, Voss’s research at the College of Applied Health Sciences merges the two: How might yoga be used to manage lasting pain? 

This fall, she was named a recipient of the Paul D. Doolen Graduate Scholarship for the Study of Aging, an annual award given to two University of Illinois graduate students whose scholarly work advances research on the human aging process. 

With the help of the Doolen scholarship, Voss will develop a yoga protocol that specifically targets interoception, or the ability to perceive and interpret the sensations within one’s own body, an ability which may fade as we age. 

The project will explore whether yoga can improve older adults’ abilities detect and interpret feelings of pain and discomfort within their bodies. 

“I found [the scholarship] relevant to my research because most of my patients are older adults,” she said. “Chronic pain is immensely prevalent in older adult populations for various reasons but interestingly older adults tend to not be included in pain trials as often.” 

It’s so immensely important that my research questions are rooted in the clinical needs of the patients.”

Stephanie Voss

Kinesiology Ph.D. candidate

What the $4,250 scholarship gives her for now is “breathing room,” Voss said. “Being a grad student isn’t always easy from a financial standpoint, so having a little bit of extra support to free up my time and mental space, it’s one less thing to worry about.” 

Voss received her B.S. in Communication Sciences and Disorders from Northwestern University in 2014 and her M.S. in Occupational Therapy from Rush University in 2018.

She began at the University of Illinois in August 2021, working under former Illinois KCH Associate Professor Neha Gothe in Gothe’s Exercise Psychology Lab. Gothe was one of the only academics exploring the connection between yoga and pain management. Voss, then fully working as an occupational therapist, reached out to Gothe over email, expressing her desire to pursue a Ph.D. under her.  

Since then, Voss has worked as a research assistant and teaching assistant, having instructed an introductory-level yoga class while periodically working with patients at the AbilityLab in Chicago. She recently taught the yoga intervention for one of Gothe’s research studies working with older adults. 

“That got to really challenge my clinical and yoga teaching skills to integrate modifying postures for people who live in different bodies than mine,” Voss said. “It’s so immensely important that my research questions are rooted in the clinical needs of the patients. I want to make sure I’m still in touch with that population.”

When Gothe departed Illinois for Northeastern University in Boston, Voss decided to stay and finish the final stages of her Ph.D. program, with KCH Professor Steve Petruzzello stepping up as her on-site doctoral co-advisor. 

“She’s very smart, and very personable,” said Petruzzello, who first met Voss while she made insightful comments in his class, KIN 443: Psychophysiology of Exercise & Sport. “It’s just refreshing for somebody to have such a good perspective on the science of what she does, but to also be very respectful and willing to take criticism for what it’s worth.” 

Both her mentors described Voss as a methodical, talented researcher whose clinical experience has given her unique perspective and a deft ability to communicate scientific concepts to different audiences.  

“She has an eye for translation and application of the research in clinical as well as real-life settings,” Gothe said. “Her years of yoga training and teaching also give her a unique advantage to work and communicate with her patients and research subjects.”

After her graduation, expected in spring 2025, Voss hopes to work in a hybrid clinical-academic position. In the meantime, Voss has seen great recruitment interest in her dissertation research, examining yoga as a strategy for chronic pain management.  

“I do feel like I will be leaving with a degree that gives me a lot of opportunity and flexibility that I can teach in occupational therapy departments. I’ll be fully qualified for that, but I’ll also be fully qualified to teach in more traditional academic university-based settings that are not necessarily a clinical program,” Voss said.  

Editor’s note:

Stephanie Voss completed her Ph.D. at Illinois in May 2025.
 

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AHS researchers: Give ADRD caregivers more information in clinical trials

Oct. 16, 2023 | Ethan Simmons

Mina Raj’s research focuses on the ways family caregivers can be better integrated into healthcare settings and teams (Photo provided)

For clinical trials centered on individuals with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, what types of information are family caregivers given during the research process? A research team nested in the College of Applied Health Sciences recently evaluated that question by analyzing ADRD trials from the past 30 years. 

What they found in their report, published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association, was that less than half of the clinical trials the researchers sampled specified the caregivers’ responsibilities. 

Given that caregivers are often surrogate decision-makers for participants and are responsible for multiple tasks throughout a clinical trial, the finding stuck out.

“The people who are finding these trials are often caregivers, they’re probably deciding whether to enroll their relatives and whether they have the bandwidth to support their relative through that intensive process,” said co-author Mina Raj, assistant professor in the Department of Kinesiology and Community Health. “And yet less than half of the time they’re given information about what they’re supposed to do.” 

For this report, funded by the Center for Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Illinois, Raj collaborated with Raksha Mudar, professor in the Department of Speech and Hearing Science at Illinois, and Dr. Vania Leung, a primary care physician in UI Health, which is part of the University of Illinois Chicago, and an assistant professor of Clinical Medicine at UIC. 

Two Community Health students took a prominent role in the report: Armando Miranda, who graduated with his master’s degree in the spring, and Eve Rubovits, currently a senior in the program. 

Raj’s research focuses on the ways family caregivers can be better integrated into healthcare settings and teams. The report’s topic arose from a separate study Raj conducted a couple of years ago, which centered on Asian American family caregivers, she said. The study combined qualitative interviews and surveys to learn about the caregivers’ challenges navigating the healthcare system. 

What consistently came up, Raj said, were the difficulties of handling the intensity and demands of clinical trials. 

“Dementia is underdiagnosed and underreported due to diagnostics that are not culturally relevant along with stigma within these communities,” she said. “Caregivers in our study experienced a lot of problems getting their relatives enrolled in clinical trials for Alzheimer’s and dementia-related diseases.” 

For example, a lot of trials expect that participants are fluent in English, which would imperil results from screening measures such as word recall tests. Caregivers have additional responsibilities in these situations, including translation, and they are often overwhelmed and underinformed about their responsibilities.

“This led to the question, what are study teams actually telling participants and caregivers about their responsibilities?” 

To expand on that question, the team dug deep into ADRD clinical trials, sampling from more than 250 trials completed between 1990 and 2021. 

The two students, Rubovits and Miranda, spearheaded the data analysis, qualitatively coding information from relevant study information pages on clinicaltrials.gov, a website commonly used to identify clinical trials. The pair also reviewed the trials to evaluate how many trials included information on caregivers’ responsibilities, and what types of responsibilities were reported. 

Rubovits joined Raj’s lab after her freshman year through the Students Pursuing Applications, Research and Knowledge program, also known as SPARK, which connects AHS undergrads to research opportunities. Six months of poring through clinical trial data was the most involved Rubovits felt in any academic study. 

“I definitely learned a lot more technical and hard-research skills,” she said. “Having a mentor like Dr. Raj, and working with grad students like Armando has been so helpful, and has honestly shaped my career goals toward wanting to do research.” 

Their findings that less than half of the analyzed trials contained instructions for caregivers gave way for a proposal: Clinical trials for ADRD should consistently provide caregivers information about their responsibilities.  

“At a baseline, we need to tell our caregivers things like how many times per week they’re going to be transporting their relative back and forth to the study site. We need to tell them the risks and benefits to participating,” Raj said. “Often [instructions] are not clear or accessible, for example through different languages. In other cases, no information is provided at all.” 

Researchers are already approaching new ground based on the study’s finding: The broader goal was to understand how to include racial and ethnic minority adults in clinical trials by engaging their family caregivers, Raj said. She has surveyed more than 100 Asian American, Hispanic and Latino caregivers for what information they’d seek in clinical trials for ADRD patients. 

“We wanted a baseline understanding of how caregivers are involved right now—this was the first step,” Raj said. “We haven’t really asked caregivers what types of information they want to see in those information pages to prepare them for caregiving responsibilities, and that’s what we’re doing right now.” 

Editor’s note:

To reach Ethan Simmons, email ecsimmon@illinois.edu.
 

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Ian Rice gets NIDILRR funding for Power of Play project

Sept. 18, 2023 | Vince Lara-Cinisomo

The project aim is to remove barriers to participation in recreational, exercise, and adaptive sports often encountered by persons with disabilities

Ian Rice

Ian Rice, a KCH teaching associate professor, received a grant of approximately $4.5 million from the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research for his called “Power of Play.”

Rice is the principal investigator and project director for Power of Play, which serves to expand access to and promote use of regular, consistent physical activity, sports participation and active recreation for persons with disabilities through research and development of novel technologies, advanced training and educational techniques, and dissemination strategies.

The mechanism is a  Rehabilitation Engineering Research Centers (RERC) Program, Rice said. The long-term strategy of this project is to remove barriers to participation in recreational, exercise, and adaptive sports often encountered by persons with disabilities, with particular emphasis on equity of access among underserved communities.

Objectives target the domains of community living and participation and health and function of persons with disabilities through research and development of novel recreational technologies, health related products and equipment, and advanced training and educational techniques.

According to Rice, Power of Play will specifically address inclusivity, incorporating proven and emerging technologies and strategies, and making adaptive sports and recreation equipment safe, available, affordable, and reliable to children, adolescents and underserved people.

Rice said the project will involve multidisciplinary collaborations among researchers at University of Pittsburgh and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign as well as health system and community partners serving people with disabilities. 

Among the research projects Rice and the group plan to accomplish are examining the impact and usability of an air-powered wheelchair (called PneuChair) capable of navigating outdoor environments previously hazardous and/or inaccessible to power mobility users. They also plan to develop and examine safe limits of use for off-road wheelchairs and hand cycles through using safe clinical limits of use tools (CLOUT) methodology and examine functionality usability and enjoyment of an inclusive, home-based smart connected arm cycle for improved overall function and quality of life in wheelchair users.  

The funding spans five years, Rice said.

Editor’s note:

To reach Vince Lara-Cinisomo, email vinlara@illinois.edu.
 

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Laura Rice gets grant to extend TechSAge work

Oct. 16, 2023 | Ethan Simmons

The research of TechSAge is pressing forward after Rice received a $4.6 million grant

Laura Rice

A “smart” bathroom optimized for safety and mobility disabilities. A tai chi telewellness program. Fall detection devices for wheelchair users. 

All are projects associated with the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center on Technologies to Support Aging Among People with Long-Term Disabilities, also known as “TechSAge.”

The research of TechSAge is pressing forward after Kinesiology and Community Health Associate Professor Laura Rice received a $4.6 million grant from the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR) to support another five years of work. 

“We want to make sure people with disabilities are able to live life to their fullest,” Rice said. “We want to make sure as people with disabilities get older, they continue to enjoy the things that they like to do.”

The goal of TechSAge is to meet the needs of people aging with long-term disabilities where they live, work, and play by conducting advanced engineering research and developing innovative technologies.

Recent surveys suggest the needs are pressing: According to current estimates, about 42.5 million Americans report living with a disability, making up roughly 13 percent of the population. That percentage jumps among older adults ages 75 or older, of whom 46 percent report having a disability. 

TechSAge started at Georgia Tech 11 years ago, with then-GT faculty Jon Sanford directing the project with co-directors Wendy Rogers and Tracy Mitzner. Rogers, now a professor in KCH and director of the McKechnie Family LIFE Home research center, moved to the University of Illinois in 2017, and the project’s presence has continued to grow on the Urbana-Champaign campus while the cross-country partnership continued. 

Rogers, Sanford—who is now at Georgia State University—and Mitzner, who is now at Person in Design, will continue as key members of the Leadership Team, along with longtime Project Coordinator, Elena Remillard, now site PI at Georgia Tech. The TechSAge team will continue to engage their vast network of industry partners and community-based stakeholders.  The projects also engage students at all levels, including undergraduates, graduates, and postdocs.

In TechSAge’s third iteration, Rice is the principal investigator, with Rogers continuing as a co-investigator. The Illinois interdisciplinary collaborators include Harshal Mahajan, assistant director of research at the McKechnie Family LIFE Home; Ian Rice, a teaching associate professor in KCH; Katie Driggs-Campbell, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Grainger College of Engineering; Girish Krishnan, an associate professor in Industrial & Enterprise Systems Engineering in the Grainger College of Engineering; and Deana McDonagh, a professor of Graphic Design in the School of Art + Design.  

“I definitely appreciate that they see something in me, and that I can be a part of leading the next several years of this center,” Rice said. “We have a very collaborative process.” 

Rice arrived in year six of the project, after her colleagues spent five years “laying the foundation” of the Center.  One of the initial projects, led by Illinois Professor Wendy Rogers, involves performing a needs assessment to understand the needs of adults aging with long-term disabilities.  These findings have helped to provide design guidance for the rest of the projects associated with the Center. 

In the last five years, the team has focused on ramping up their interventions and technology solutions to assist the aging of people with long-term disabilities. Jon Sanford and Georgia Tech researcher Brian Jones have spearheaded the “SmartBathroom” at the university’s Aware Home to meet the needs of people with mobility disabilities, for example. 

Much of the lab-based research at Illinois has taken place at the McKechnie Family LIFE Home, the research center dedicated to technological innovations in the home environment. One on-site project led by Katie Driggs-Campbell is focused on developing an assistive robot to help older adults who are blind or low-vision navigate through their space.  Another robotics project co-led by Girish Krishnan and Ian Rice will develop a robot shower to enable safe and independent bathing for older wheelchair users. The LIFE Home will be used for preliminary testing in both robot projects.

“Research can be a hard process, we do have to go slow—especially with technology, we need to make sure that we’re developing things properly so that it will be useful and usable to individuals who are beneficiaries of it,” Rice said. Projects emphasize user-centered design and the inclusion of people aging with disabilities in all stages of the R&D process.

That said, some projects are nearing their release to the public, Rice said. TechSAge researchers at Person in Design and Georgia Tech, Tracy Mitzner and Elena Remillard, have adapted a tai chi intervention to support the needs of adults aging with long-term disabilities, using a telewellness protocol to deliver a physical activity and social engagement opportunity in a safe and supportive manner. 

“In these next five years, we have the ability to take these projects to the next level,” Rice said. 

Editor’s note:

To reach Ethan Simmons, email ecsimmon@illinois.edu.
 

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Student Spotlight: Anjali Patel forging her path

May 31, 2023 | Ethan Simmons

Like the millions of other high school seniors who applied for college during the COVID-19 pandemic, Anjali Patel made her choice of campus sight unseen.

Hailing from Memphis, Tenn., she hadn’t set foot near the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign when she was accepted to the College of Applied Health Sciences in spring 2020.

“I guess I got here by luck,” said Patel, now a rising senior in Interdisciplinary Health Sciences. “I didn’t have a particular reason other than I just loved what this major was.”

Patel often credits good fortune for guiding her college experience, from deciding to go to Illinois to landing in the research lab of Kinesiology and Community Health Associate Professor Sandraluz Lara-Cinisomo.

But chance alone can’t explain the continued academic rise of this first-generation AHS student, who’s heading for a prestigious research opportunity this summer.

As she progresses toward her goal of medical school, Patel is satisfied with her choice of major.

“You do learn the science as part of your prerequisites for whatever path you want to follow,” she said. “But then also you get to learn about health disparities and organizations of health care—there’s just so much more that you learn with this major that makes it different from all the others.”

Patel’s next stop is a 2023 Summer Undergraduate Psychology Experience in Research fellowship. Patel and a cohort of 24 other American and Canadian undergrads from underrepresented backgrounds were selected from a competitive field of applicants to spend nine weeks in laboratory settings for psychological science.

Patel will continue a critical study documenting the experiences of women living with postpartum pain and depression, work she began in Lara-Cinisomo’s Laboratory for Emotion and Stress Assessment.

The I-Health major found the lab in the second semester of her freshman year. “She hit the ground running,” Lara-Cinisomo said, adding that Patel helped grad students in the lab prepare materials for new studies.

“It was evident that Anjali was eager to learn more about research,” Lara-Cinisomo said.

Patel has already conducted participant interviews with intense research studies, such as a broad look at how COVID-19 affected Latina and Mexican American mothers in the U.S. With the subjects at hand, many interviews become emotionally difficult.

“There’s a learning curve in trying to understand how to respond to someone who’s sensitive to what they’re talking about while trying to complete your job,” Patel said.

But her role is also an exercise in empathy, discussing issues such as pregnancy and medical complications in an academic setting.

“It was just very eye-opening to listen to all those experiences, and even now with my current interviews, it’s interesting to learn so much about mothers’ experiences,” she said.

Lara-Cinisomo will continue to be Patel’s mentor through the summer fellowship.

“She takes every role seriously and is diligent,” Lara-Cinisomo said. “The summer research experience will build on Anjali’s passion for research. I am confident Anjali will excel.”

In addition to her studies on the pre-med track, Patel will serve as president of the student organization Mentors in Medicine next year, which pairs upperclassmen and underclassmen interested in healthcare careers.

“As a freshman, I didn’t know what I needed to do. Now, I feel like as a junior I have so much to tell people to help them,” Patel said.

Editor’s note:

To reach Ethan Simmons, email ecsimmon@illinois.edu.
 

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CHAD symposium returns with thanks for pilot grants

March 03, 2023 | Vince Lara-Cinisomo

Pilot grants reignite Chad Symposium, fostering research collaboration and innovation

KCH Associate Professor Naiman Khan’s presentation was titled “Role of Omega-3 Lipid Metabolites in Obesity and Cognitive Function” (Photo by Lisa Bralts)

The first Center for Health, Aging, and Disability (CHAD) symposium since 2017 was a celebration of the research accomplished with the help of the Pilot Grant Program.

Three researchers from the College of Applied Health Sciences—Naiman Khan, an associate professor in Kinesiology and Community Health; Brian Monson, an assistant professor in Speech and Hearing Science, and Sharon Zou, an assistant professor in Recreation, Sport and Tourism, made a point of thanking CHAD’s grants for helping launch their studies.

Khan, whose presentation was titled “Role of Omega-3 Lipid Metabolites in Obesity and Cognitive Function,” said CHAD’s funding was vital to his work.

“CHAD was really helpful in us starting a new line of engagement of research,” he said. 

CHAD director Jeff Woods, AHS’ associate dean for research, said to date, 38 pilot grants have been awarded since CHAD was launched in 2010, with $860,000 awarded to AHS researchers for pilot research. Woods described CHAD’s role as “work at the bookends of medicine … with the goal of improving people’s lives.”

“CHAD pilot grants are really important for junior faculty,” Zou said.

And the payoff has been well worth it, Woods said, citing the return on investment as approximately $16 in external funding to $1 in CHAD funding. 

Zou’s presentation was titled “Exploring an Efficient and Equitable Entrance Fee for Public Lands: A Community-based investigation in the Indiana Dunes National Park.”

“I study how people have fun,” Zou said, explaining that it was vital for public parks and other tourism industries to build a sustainable revenue model and not to rely on decreasing funding from state and federal sources. 

The primary purpose of Zou’s study was to “understand visitors’ and surrounding community residents’ perceptions of Indiana Dunes National Park user fees to inform a fee structure that balances revenue generation and equitable access.”

During and after the COVID-19 pandemic, Zou said, “parks saw explosions of people visiting.” While that was great for parks in terms of revenue, it also led to increasing operation costs at a time when government funding for these sites is being reduced.

“The specific goal is to find out how visitors see the park fees, and are they fair?,” Zou said.

The RST researcher said her preliminary findings indicate there was no consensus from study participants on what “fair” means, and that tension between fairness principles partly explains the longstanding controversy and debate on public land user fees.

Khan’s presentation focused on how poor lifestyle choices can predict an early onset of dementia, noting that obesity worldwide has increased threefold since the 1980s. The KCH researcher said his research, in conjunction with Aditi Das of Georgia Tech, suggested that the a deficiencyin the hormone dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA)—which has been reported to have beneficial effects on obesity, diabetes mellitus, and serum lipids in animals—was associated with individuals with a body-mass index (BMI) of 25 or higher, which is classified as obese.

“BMI is inversely connected to cognitive function,” Khan said. “Only in obese individuals do we see DHEA increase in circulation.” Khan said his preliminary results found:

  • Circulating Omega-3 metabolites were higher among persons with higher weight status and the levels were associated with degree of fat mass
  • Circulating metabolites inversely associated with cognitive function
  • Only observed among persons with overweight and obesity
  • Selectively associated with hippocampal function
  • Implications for memory function

Khan said his overarching goal was to “develop effective lifestyle approaches to improve cognitive function.”

SHS’ Monson discussed his study called “Capturing Prenatal Auditory Experience.”

“If there was a pregnant woman in this audience, that baby would be hearing my voice, and perhaps making judgments,” he said, drawing laughter from the gathering. “How do we know? Because full-term newborns come to the world with memories of what they’ve heard, including the mother’s voice.”

In utero, Monson explained, was a unique acoustic environment. When preterm infants are delivered, they are placed into incubators, which rapidly changed the sound profile, he said. The consequences of those changes include increased risk for sensorineural hearing loss, auditory neuropathy, language and speech developmental delays, auditory attention deficits and auditory processing disorder.

Monson’s study involved a group of pregnant women wearing a LENA listening device twice a week during the third trimester, while the device was placed into cribs of very preterm infants at Carle Foundation Hospital three times a week through their stay in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU).

“Fetuses are getting 2.5 hours a day of speech exposure vs. 32 minutes a day for very preterm infants,” he said. “It’s an alarming difference to me.”
NICU infants may incur a deficit of about 150 hours of speech exposure over the course of the preterm period, he explained.

One of the possible mitigation strategies for very preterm infants could be to provide meaningful targets (about three hours a day of speech exposure) to optimize auditory exposures in NICU settings.

“The maternal heartbeat is never turned off in utero,” he said. “The maternal heartbeat is never turned on in NICU.”

Following the CHAD Pilot Grant success stories, Wendy Rogers, the Shahid and Ann Carlson Khan Professor of Applied Health Sciences, talked about the work of Collaborations in Health, Aging, Research, & Technology (CHART).

CHART’s mission is to enable successful aging through:

  • Fundamental research
  • Advanced technology development
  • Education of researchers, developers, healthcare professionals, older adults
  • Guidance for policy decision-making
  • Translation of these efforts to positively affect the lives of older adults

CHART was the first research theme of the College of Applied Health Sciences and boasts the development of the McKechnie Family LIFE Home, an interdisciplinary research facility and simulated home environment that helps promote community engagement, industry partnerships, healthcare collaborations and faculty innovation.

Also part of the symposium was the introduction of a new AHS research theme called CARD (Collaborations in the Advancement of Research on Disability), led by KCH Associate Professor Laura Rice and KCH Professor John Kosciulek. CARD is focused on enhancing the health and quality of life of people with disabilities—through research that addresses critical gaps in disability-related knowledge and outreach that engages individuals with disabilities. 

CARD’s short-term goals include:

  • Develop a collaborative working group
  • Develop communication strategies
  • Establish a steering committee of stakeholders
  • Develop and implement outreach and engagement events

Longer-term goals include:

  • Host a bi-annual research symposium
  • Develop a “toolkit” for UIUC faculty to support the performance of disability-related research in the Champaign-Urbana area
  • Respond to disability-related funding opportunities
  • Establish a competitive program to provide supplemental funding to support ongoing disability research among junior faculty
  • Host a seminar series with external experts
  • Establish a research training program for students registered with DRES interested in doing research
  • Support the development of new research registries and/or expansion of current registries

The first CARD meeting is set for March 22.

In kicking off the symposium, AHS Dean Cheryl Hanley-Maxwell said CHAD was “one of the biggest attractions” of her decision to come to Illinois and lead the college.

“When I thought about CHAD, I thought it’d be interesting to lead a college that has this kind of momentum to it, and I’ve been proven correct, year after year,” she said. “CHAD provides students with real-world engagement, and plays an absolutely critical role in their professional development.”

Woods agreed.

“We’re helping put the next generation of scientists into the field.”

Editor’s note:

To reach Vince Lara-Cinisomo, email vinlara@illinois.edu.
 

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