Professor Lori Michener and her team strive to reduce elbow injuries in baseball

UCL injury has been occurring more frequently in college baseball athletes, especially pitchers, in the past decade, and USC physical therapy researcher Lori Michener is hoping to one day prevent it altogether.

A Father's Love

USC’s interdisciplinary ALS clinic helps Shaun Kalpakoff prolong the onset of ALS’ devastating symptoms, giving the single father precious time to play with his 10-year-old son.

2 Days in the Life

With the advent of the new DPT@USC hybrid program, which began this summer, there are now two educational paths that ultimately converge into a USC doctor of physical therapy degree. In this issue, we asked first-year residential DPT student Cheri Chan DPT ’21 and first-year hybrid student Maya Acocella DPT ’21 to chronicle two days in their lives as USC DPT students to show how similar (and, in some cases, how different) the two educational paths are.

Ounce of Prevention

An innovative collaboration between USC’s physical therapy and dentistry programs leads to work with less pain.

Ready Player One

USC physical therapy researcher teams up with computer scientist to develop voice-assisted device that provides gamified speech therapy for children with cerebral palsy.

USC physical therapy researcher Barbara Sargent aims to detect cerebral palsy in infants earlier than ever before

Assistant Professor of Clinical Physical Therapy Barbara Sargent is leading a new study to find out if a particular type of movement — decreased selective leg control — can be used to diagnose cerebral palsy in very early infancy.

USC physical therapy researcher to join interdisciplinary effort to study colorectal cancer’s effects on young people

Assistant Professor of Research Christina Dieli-Conwright awarded $25K to study how physical function, body composition and certain biomarkers are affected by cancer treatment.

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Upcoming Events

March 20

4:00 pm

Guest Lecture: Stephen Coombes, PhD

Special lecture by Stephen Coombes, Ph.D., Principal Investigator, Laboratory for Rehabilitation Neuroscience University of Florida

"Pain and Motor processing in the human brain"

Abstract: Stephen Coombes investigates how the brain controls movement and how the brain processes pain. He studies how these systems are altered in different chronic pain conditions. His current research is focused on combining virtual reality with brain imaging to understand how pain changes the way that we move and to better implement pain treatments to target neural activity to relive pain and restore function.

In this talk he will highlight recent studies from his laboratory that use high density EEG and functional MRI during pain and motor tasks. These data demonstrate that chronic pain leads to changes in brain function that are network specific and task specific. The long-term goal of his laboratory is to leverage this knowledge to understand why interventions for chronic pain work, and how they can be improved.

Location: Center for the Health Professions Building (CHP)

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