January 20, 2011: Congratulations, Mariah, on getting into graduate school! Good luck on your decision making!.

January 2012: Welcome Josh Harper, our newest Master's student.

November 9, 2011: Congratulations Molly on passing your Comprehensive Exam!

October 13-17, 2011: Dr. Luchies and Sommer are attending the conference sponsored by Society of Neuroscience in Washington, DC. Sommer will be co-presenting a poster there with our collaborators from KUMC.

Autumn 2011: Annaria is working with Dr Luchies and our new collaborator Marissa Clark, MPT on putting together a study looking at the effects of physical theapy on Parkinson's disease.

August 2011: Sommer is looking forward to being the instructor of record for the freshmen course ME 208 - Intro to Digital Computing.

August 2011: Contratulations, Molly, on fininshing data collection.

August 12, 2011: Contratulations to our collaborator, Gustaf, on defending your PhD! Good luck in rotations! (Gustaf is an MD/PhD student, pictured below)

August 2011: Welcome back, Mariah, from a summer spent at Baylor College of Medcine in Houston, TX working on an REU project looking at the primary visual cortex and hippocampus firing patterns of rats during sleep. a

July 2011: Our lab is getting prepared for a final round of testing for Molly’s balance study. Data collection should begin by the end of August.

July 2011: Molly hosted high school boys and girls for Project Discovery.  The students really enjoyed the lesson about their center of pressure and balance.

July 18, 2011: Annaria and Ms. Halterman went down to a children’s education service center of southeast KS, Greenbush, where they taught elementary school children a lesson from their bioengineering toolkit they developed in June. It was a great success!

June 2011: Welcome to Patrick, who will be working on some upper arm modeling in ADAMS this summer.

June 2011: Our Lab hosted Ms. Bridget Halterman, 5th grade teacher at Piper Elementary of KS, a member of the Research Experience for Teachers summer program. With Bridget we designed a toolkit for Ms. Halterman’s science and math classes that help her students understand bioengineering principles related to balance, walking and running.

February 17, 2011: Congratulations Sommer and Gustaf on winning the Capitol Graduate Research Summit in Topeka! Sommer and Gustaf presented a poster to the state legislators,  board of regents members, and others in the Capitol and were selected as one of two posters from KU to receive a cash award. Read the press release here. (Photo credit: Graduate Studies of KU)

February 2011: Congratulations, Annaria on your engagement!!!

February 2011: Welcome back to the Lawrence Lab, Sommer and Molly! Molly has returned from maternity leave, and Sommer is celebrating the end of data collection at the med center. Now on to all that data analysis!

January 2011: Mariah Whitmore (senior at KU) joins us this semester to do a project in EMG analysis.

December 2010: Sommer presented the Neuroscience poster at the Self Graduate Fellows end of the year poster session. Pictured below is KU Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Jeffery S. Vitter. (Photo credit: Sharon Graham)

November 13-17, 2010: Neuroscience 2010. Sommer and Dr. Luchies and our collaborators Gustaf and Dr. Cheney traveled to San Diego, CA to present a poster at the conference for the Society of Neuroscience. There were over 30,000 attendees and we came home with a plethora of new knowledge about motor control. We are excited to apply this knowledge to our research, and specifically the data we’re collecting right now!

November 3, 2010: Congratulations to Molly and her husband, Scott, on the birth of their beautiful little boy!

September 2010: Welcome to two undergraduate engineering students, Zach and Mariah who will be helping with data processing of motion capture this year.

July 2010: We are in the middle of two major sets of data collection. We apologize for a slow or delayed news feed.

July 2010: A huge thank you to Charles Gabel and the other men in the machine shop for building us a new floor!  We are excited to begin testing for Molly’s final dissertation project on balance in Parkinson’s Disease compared to healthy older adults.

June 2010: Welcome Annaria Nardone, our newest PhD student! Annaria is also a new Madison and Lila Self Fellow. She is originally from South Windsor, Connecticut and got her B.S. in Physics/Engineering at Washington Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.

Welcome also to Patricia, a student from Haskell University here in Lawrence. Patricia is in the Bridge program between Haskell and KU and will be working on a project in the lab, and helping with data processing.

December 2009: Sommer spent Christmas visiting friends in India

November 2009: Molly’s paper was published in Gait and Posture
Title of the article: Early biomechanical markers of postural instability in Parkinson's disease (google-scholar link)

October 2009: Molly ran in two marathons (Portland, Oct 4 and New York City, Nov 1) in one month

November 2009: Dr. Luchies and Sommer observed a surgery at KUMC

September 25, 2009: Dr. Jeff Schiffman, former student of Dr Luchies presented at the Bioengineering Colloquium at KU. Title of talk: Biomechanical and Human Performance Evaluation of Exoskeletons

August 2009: Michael landed a job teaching High School science in southern Arkansas

August 2009: Molly and Antonis presented at the American Society of Biomechanics conference in State College, PA. Title of posters:

• Comparison of an automatic and voluntary task in early Parkinson’s disease
• Postural sway changes in mile to moderate Parkinson’s disease

June – August 2009: The Biodynamics Lab hosted Mr. Shannon Hayden, 4th grade teacher at Eudora Elementary, KS, a member of the Research Experience for Teachers summer program. We built a biomechanics toolkit for Mr. Hayden’s science classes along with  smaller biomechanics toolkits for the other teachers in the program.  We can’t wait to help teach the lessons and help kids discover the biomechanics of walking and running next spring!

Tuesday, June 2, 2009: Michael Haines successfully defended his Master's Thesis entitled "Transition between single and multiple stepping strategies in forward fall recovery".

Fall 2008: Molly taught the “Instrumentation and Measurements 1” course at the University of Missouri Kansas City

August 2008: Molly and Greg presented at the North American Congress on Biomechanics in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Michael and Sommer attended

• Title of Molly’s presentation: The effect of Parkinson’s disease on the response to a backwards pull: Center of pressure
• Title of Greg’s poster: The role of knee extensor strength in landing phase characteristics of a balance-restoring step response

June 2008: Molly presented at American Society of Mechanical Engineers in Marco Island, FL
Title of Molly’s presentation: The effect of Parkinson’s disease on the step response to a backwards pull