Juergen Konczak, Ph.D., professor and director of the Human Sensorimotor Control Laboratory, is a co-principal investigator on a €520,000 ($686,000) grant awarded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), a federal agency considered the German equivalent to the National  Institutes of Health (NIH) or the National Science Foundation (NSF). Dr. Dagmar Timmann, a neurologist at the University Medical Center in Essen, Germany, is the other PI. The three-year grant will explore the feasibility of proprioceptive training for patients with spinocerebellar ataxia (SCA), a genetic disease that currently is not treatable through medication.

SCA is usually categorized by slowly progressive incoordination of the limbs and associated with poor coordination of hands, speech, and eye movements. Like most diseases, the symptoms very person to person and depend on the specific type of SCA. In many cases the person maintains their mental ability while slowly losing physical control of their body. Proprioceptive training is a behavioral intervention aimed to improve body awareness, which in turn may lead to better motor outcomes in these patients who suffer from SCA.