Students Participating in Research with Support from the Falk Center

Prior to early 2001 when the first graduate student received support from the Falk Medical Trust Foundation, biomedical engineering graduate students from Marquette University were not engaged in neurorehabilitation or telerehabilitation research. There now have been over 30 past or ongoing graduate students, including eight ongoing doctoral students.

Falk support has been especially valuable for leveraging resources and matching on other grants that have helped accelerate this transformational process. The Falk Center has provided co-funding support for the following twenty-one engineering graduate students (roughly in chronologic order from when first receiving funding):

• Christopher Ellsworth (therajoy project for arm movements in stroke neurorehab)
• Anna Adenine Stanislaus (remote neuro-assessment of stroke, using videoconferencing)
• Yu "Fish" Wang (dynamic neurofuzzy models for intelligent prognosis prediction in neurorehab)
• Mike Dai (computer programming for intelligent telerehab assistants)
• Kyle Lillis (hand path curvature sensitivity during reaching with various force field effects)
• Matt Amans (effort of vibration perturbations on proprioceptive sense of limb position)
• Mike McDonald (contribution of ankle plantarflexors on contracture in SCI)
• Rick Ivnik (ankle range of motion and estimated muscle lengths and reflexes in SCI)
• Xin "Tyre" Feng (UniTherapy tool for stroke neuroassessment and telesupported therapy)
• Samir Sangani (use of biomechanical model to study spasticity data)
• Kevin Garrison (modulation of spastic reflexes in SCI during autonomic dysreflexia)
• Timothy Judkins (sensory contributions to motor adaptation during reaching movements against loads)
• Laura Johnson (advanced Therajoy for stroke neurorehab assessment)
• Matthew Cole (cortical reorganization following SCI using fMRI)
• Kimberly Wisneski (rehabilitation robotics, related to stroke neurotherapy)
• Mukta Joshi (co-contraction of elbow in stroke during reaching before/after BOTOX)
• Debjani Chaudhouri, (knee and hip movement-induced reflexes in SCI)
• Zac Dooley (muscle vibrator and robot to study proprioceptors and motor learning)
• Tim Haswell (use of robot to how disturbances influence neural processes mediating motor adaptation)
• Xiaolin Liu (use of CyberGlove to study visual/proprioceptive feedback during novel tasks)
• Pawan Shroff (intelligent multimodal interfaces for persons with stroke using UniTherapy)

Also receiving support has been a part-time physical therapy graduate student (Jennifer Donohoe) and roughly ten undergraduate students, most especially as summer interns.

Another dozen biomedical engineering graduate students engaged in rehabilitation research have benefited from equipment funded by this Center (e.g., Bob Steldt, Kelly Heglund, Aaron Siminski, Tiffiany Klein, David Cotey, Yayha Bahlool, Andrew Starsky, Brooke Hingtgen, Kelly Baker, Sean Campbell, Vaidehi Chaukulkulkar, Tanya Onushko, Negar Farzinnia). Finally, more than two dozen undergraduate students have worked on senior design team projects that target development of devices related to this initiative.

Thus, since 2001 roughly 60 students from Marquette University have been impacted by support from the Falk Medical Trust!

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