Earlier this year, Dr. Whyte and I acquired funding from the Pennsylvania Department of Health for my post-doc research, “Electrophysiologic and behavioral evidence of consciousness: a longitudinal analysis.” This will connect my latest training in cognitive electrophysiology with my background in motor control. In the last year, I presented the keynote addresses for the University of Kentucky DPT program’s Annual Research Day as well as the Annual Meeting of the Commonwealth Chapter of Rehabilitation Nurses. I also was honored to receive a poster presentation award at the Center for Clinical and Translational Science Appalachian Health Summit/Spring Neuroscience Day for my work, “Pursuing treatments for Disorders of Consciousness: theories of common neural mechanisms underlying consciousness and locomotor activity.”

The RSD program, combined with the T32 pre-doctoral program, instilled in me the intellectual confidence and essential background in interdisciplinary neuroplasticity research to venture into the field of DoC. This area was a clinical passion of mine but virtually untouched by physical therapist researchers. Although my doctoral work and publications focused on walking recovery after spinal cord injury, the fundamentals of that work fostered a perspective on possible recovery mechanisms enabled by physical rehabilitation that could be applied to any injured nervous system.

Luther Gill, Dissertation Title – “Diaphragm Plasticity: High Cervical Spinal Hemisection (C2hs) and Systemic Sepsis”

Lisa LaGorio, Dissertation Title – “Effects of Bolus Accommodation on Swallowing Effort in Healthy Elderly Individuals”

Martina Spiess, Disseration Title:  “Presence, Assessment And Plasticity Of Descending Pathways After Spinal Cord Injury Day”

Ravneet Vohra, Disseration Title – “Non-Invasive Monitoring of Disease Progression in Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy”

We wish you success in your future endeavors! Go Gators!

RSD student, Ginny Little, was recently named a finalist in the student paper competition for the International Conference on Neurorehabilitation. Her paper is titlied ”So-called ‘Foot-Drop’ post-stroke: Not a dorsiflexor impairment”. The conference was held in Toledo, Spain on November 14-16th, 2012.

Ginny will also be presenting the Marilyn Gossman Graduate Student Research Seminar, Section on Research at the American Physical Therapy Association’s Combined Sections meeting in Januay, 2013. Her paper is titled “Reduced walking speed disrupts interjoint coordination in the absence of pathology”.

Arun Jayaraman PT, PhD

I graduated from the RSD program in 2008. I went on to do a two year post-doc at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago/Northwestern University under Drs. William Zev Rymer and Thomas George Hornby.

Currently, I am an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation and Medical Social Sciences at Northwestern University, Chicago, IL. I am also a Research Scientist at the Center for Bionic Medicine, and the Associate Director of The Max Nader Center for Rehabilitation Outcomes at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago.

My current grant funding, both as a Principal Investigator (PI) and Co-Investigator (co-I), include a five year National Institute of Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR, co-PI) grant, a five year industry grant from Ottobock Inc. (PI), a couple of Department of Defense (DOD, PI &Co-I) grants, and a couple of NIH small business innovation research grants (SBIR, Co-PI). I have previously received funding from the Paralyzed Veterans of America and Honda R&D. Recently, I have recently published manuscripts as both senior and co-author in peer-reviewed journals such as PLoS-1, Neurorab Neural Repair, and Journal of Physiology.

I owe a lot of my limited success to the RSD program. It significantly prepared me for a faculty position by training me in both basic science and clinical research. The program gave me the opportunity to take courses from different departments and to interact and collaborate with numerous research groups. The RSD program has state of art research facilities and the best faculty for mentorship and guidance.  Coming out of the RSD program, I had great confidence in not only my research skills but also in my teaching and networking skills.  On the flip side, it is a great place to have fun. I played basketball and flag-football with colleagues and faculty members and also thoroughly enjoyed being part of the RSD student block for the Gator Football games.