BME Senior Published in Nature’s Scientific Reports

Heather Stokes, a senior undergraduate research assistant with BME faculty Dr. Jason Franz in the Applied Biomechanics Laboratory, has been published in Nature’s Scientific Reports. By tightly coupling sensory perturbations in an immersive virtual reality environment with quantitative motion capture and electromyography, her research revealed critical insight into the neuromuscular origins of step-to-step corrective motor responses underlying balance control during human walking. The new findings point to specific muscular contributions to orchestrating balance corrections in walking and provide an important foundation for the emergence and progression of balance impairment due to aging and neurodegenerative disease. The paper, “Neuromechanical origins of kinematic variability during perturbed walking,” was published in April 2017 and was also featured in UNC Healthcare News.