Marissa Thill, a senior in Kinesiology, has received a U of M Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) award. Working as a research assistant since the summer of 2015 in the Human Sensorimotor Control Laboratory (HSCL), directed by Jürgen Konczak, Ph.D., Thill’s research seeks to determine if experts who are highly skilled in a particular motor skill also have a heightened sense of body awareness related to that skill. Specifically, Thill will test proprioceptive sensitivity of the wrist joint in skilled baseball players in comparison to active soccer players. If throwing is associated with a heightened sense of wrist joint motion, baseball players should be superior to soccer players. Dr. Konczak, serving as Thill’s faculty mentor, comments: “Marissa has developed an exciting undergraduate research project. While people have always assumed that people who are highly skilled motorically also have a high sense of body awareness, the actual empirical evidence to support such a claim is very poor.”

The UROP Award offers financial awards to full-time undergraduates for quality research, scholarly, or creative projects that are judged to contribute to the student’s academic development and which are undertaken in collaboration with a faculty sponsor.