Smith presents at Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting

November 5, 2015

Thomas Smith, Ph.D., presented two papers at the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 59th Annual Meeting, on Oct. 26-30 in Los Angeles, CA. The first of these papers, Observer Perceptions of Overall System Quality – the Lake Wobegon Effect, has been published in the Proceedings for the meeting. The second paper, Occupancy and Patient Care Quality Benefits of Private Room Relative to Multi-Bed Patient Room Designs for Five Different Children’s Hospital Intensive and Intermediate Care Units, will be published in a 2016 special issue of WORK: A Journal of Prevention, Assessment & Rehabilitation.

Dr. Smith also presented three papers at the 19th Triennial Congress of the International Ergonomics Association, earlier this year on August 9-14 in Melbourne, Australia. The three papers are titled; A Philosophy of Ergonomics/Human Factors – An Updated Perspective, Differing Systems Perspectives on Educational Quality, and Driver Distraction is Greater with Cell Phone Conversation than with Passenger Conversation C A Social Cybernetic Interpretation (with Z. Yang).

U of M welcomes elite Chinese athletes and coach to Twin Cities for second cohort of China Champions Program

November 4, 2015

wordmark-umn-china-champions To foster an exchange of culture, education and sport, the University of Minnesota will host eight Chinese Olympic and world champion athletes and one Olympic-level coach as part of the School of Kinesiology’s China Champions Program (CCP), arriving today, Wednesday, November 4, in the afternoon. This is the second year of the unique program. Biographies for each Champion are available here.

Led by the School of Kinesiology, in collaboration with Beijing Sport University and supported by the Chinese government’s Scholarship Council, CCP is a unique, global collaboration that provides mutual benefits for Chinese athletes and University faculty, staff and students.

“This partnership offers the chance for visiting athletes and many at the University to engage, teach and enhance learning from each other,” said Li Li Ji, Ph.D., director of the School of Kinesiology and founder of the China Champions Program . “Our goal is to ensure all involved gain insight and appreciation for the cultures in each country and harness that knowledge to benefit our world.”

During the next year, participants will attend specially designed courses in the School of Kinesiology, including academic seminars, workshops and English as a Learned Language classes. Beyond the classroom, athletes will visit Minnesota cultural sites and become acclimated with the Twin Cities area, as well as take tours of University and local professional sports team’s stadiums, arenas and training facilities.

University partners with the School of Kinesiology include the University of Minnesota China Center, the Global Programs and Strategy Alliance (GPS Alliance), and the College of Education and Human Development (CEHD).

“Globalization and internationalization are an important part of CEHD’s mission of applying principles and practices of multiculturalism to advance teaching and learning,” said CEHD Dean Jean Quam. “As we welcome another cohort of the CCP, we extend and promote this unique two-way discovery between our students, faculty, staff, and community and elite Chinese athletes.”

Local business and government leaders will also meet with the athletes to give them a behind-the-scenes look into international corporations, government and the American culture. Each of the Chinese participants are continuing their education as part of a master’s level graduate program with Beijing Sport University, the top sport university in China.

“Entering year two of this program, we are excited to continue to use sport to bridge cultures,” said Rayla Allison, associate director of the School of Kinesiology and executive director of the China Champions Program. “Last year’s program was a great success by all measures due to engagement and support of the College of Education and Human Development and Global Programs and Strategy Alliance, plus the numerous volunteers and community members who so graciously championed the program.”

Richardson to present at Saturday Scholars 2015 on November 7

November 2, 2015

Tiffany Richardson, Ph.D., lecturer in the School of Kinesiology, will participate in CEHD’s Saturday Scholars 2015 on November 7 at the McNamara Alumni Center. This year’s program, titled “The future is made here: Innovation in CEHD,” will showcase the many ways that CEHD faculty and staff are pushing the boundaries of education, healthcare, and technology.

Dr. Richardson’s presentation, “Hitting a home run with sustainability at Major League Baseball’s All Star Game,” begins at 11 a.m. in the Johnson Great Room.

Allison comments on economic impact of “mega” sporting events

October 30, 2015

<a href= Rayla Allison, J.D., associate director of the School of Kinesiology, was interviewed by the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal on the economic impact of major sporting events coming to the Twin Cities.

In the interview, Allison references specific events such as the Ryder Cup, Super Bowl LII, and the NCAA Final Four, and how these events will impact the metro area.

The article will be published in the November 13th issue of the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal.

HSCL and APAL students to present posters at inaugural CATSS event

October 29, 2015

Doctoral students in the School of Kinesiology’s Human Sensorimotor Control Laboratory (HSCL), and Affordance Perception-Action Laboratory (APAL) will present posters at the University’s new Center of Applied and Translational Sensory Science (CATSS) first scientific event, the CATSS Opening Scientific Symposium, on Friday, October 30. Naveen Elangovan, I-ling Yeh, Jessica Holst-Wolf, and Sanaz Khosravani represented HSCL, while APAL was represented by Justin Munafo and Meg Diedrick, undergrad honors student and UROP awardee.

The HSCL students will share a wide-range of related research in vision, hearing, neural prostheses, balance, and tinnitus. Munafo will present a poster on sex differences in motion sickness among users of the Oculus Rift virtual reality system.

The vision of CATSS is to harness the University of Minnesota’s world-leading scientific expertise in sensory science to tackle the problems faced by millions of people with sensory deficits, such as low vision or hearing loss. With our aging population, sensory deficits that cut people off from their social and physical environment will have an increasingly devastating impact at both the individual and societal levels

Kinesiology alum takes students all the way to the Super Bowl

October 27, 2015

Kinesio campisi_charles050213_sk001web logy alumnus Charles Campisi (Ph.D., 2013) is an assistant professor of sport management at Baldwin Wallace College in Berea, OH, a suburb of Cleveland. And while the Cleveland Brown’s FirstEnergy stadium has yet to host a Super Bowl, for the past four years Dr. Campisi has given a group of lucky undergraduates the unforgettable experience of working behind the scenes at the NFL’s biggest Game Day of the year.

Dr. Campisi has taken about 30 students each year to Super Bowls in New Orleans, East Rutherford, New Jersey, and Glendale, Arizona. This year they will go to Santa Clara, CA for Super Bowl 50. Students take a class, History of the Super Bowl, where they learn about the organizational support and planning required for major sports events, then apply their new skills to events and activities during the four days leading up to the Super Bowl and on game day.

Read more about Dr. Campisi’s unique experiences for undergraduates here. His doctoral adviser was Lisa Kihl, Ph.D., associate professor in the School of Kinesiology.

Richardson is panelist at 2015 AASHE conference

October 27, 2015

Tiffany Richardson, Ph.D., sport management lecturer in the School of Kinesiology, is participatin RichardsonT-2013 g today in a panel discussion at the 2015 Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) conference held this week at the Minneapolis Convention Center. Conference participants will tour the TCF Bank Stadium, the first collegiate or professional football stadium in the country to achieve LEED certification, a rating system that measures the design, construction and operation of high performance green buildings, homes and neighborhoods. The tour will highlight how sustainability was incorporated in the construction of the facility and its operation, including an ambitious waste diversion program that diverted 82% of game day waste last season.

Dr. Richardson teaches a sport management course on sustainability in sports and takes her “Green Team” students each year to MLB’s All-Star Game, giving them hands-on experience teaching fans about reducing waste in a sports context. She will participate in a panel featuring practitioners from colleges and the private sector discussing challenges and opportunities in creating successful collegiate sports greening programs.

APAL student researchers present posters at Biology and Control of Nausea and Vomiting conference

October 26, 2015

Doctoral students Justin Munafo and Ruixuan Li, members of the Affordance Perception-Action Laboratory (APAL) directed by Kinesiolog y professor Tom Stoffregen, Ph.D., presented posters at the 2015 conference on Biology and Control of Nausea and Vomiting, Pittsburgh, PA, October 23-24. Mr. Munafo is a Kinesiology student and Ms. Li is a Human Factors/Ergonomics student from the College of Design. Both students are advised by Dr. Stoffregen.

Dengel to be published as co-author in Journal of Applied Physiology

October 23, 2015

Donald R. Dengel, Ph.D., professor of kinesiology and director of the Laboratory of Integrative Human Physiology, co-authored the article “Age and sex relationship with flow-mediated dilation in healthy children and adolescents” to be published in the Journal of Applied Physiology. The article examines the relationship of age and sex on vascular function in 978 children located in 3 countries. Four graduates of the School of Kinesiology; Kara Marlatt, Ph.D., Hanan Zavala, M.S., and Aaron Kelly, Ph.D. are also co-authors on the paper.

Doctoral students present at Society for Neuroscience

October 23, 2015

Doctoral students from the Human Sensorimotor Control Laboratory (HSCL), Anna Vera Cuppone, Naveen Elangovan, Jessica Holst, Sanaz Khosravani, and I-ling Yeh presented posters at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Chicago last week. This conference is the largest meeting of neuroscientists, attracting over 28,000 attendees from across the globe.

These doctoral students are advised and mentored by professor Juergen Konczak, Ph.D., director of the HSCL.

Gao named to Editorial Board of Games for Health Journal

October 19, 2015

Zan Gao, Ph.D., assistant professor in behavioral aspects of physical activity and director of the Physical Activity Epidemiology Laboratory in the School of Kinesiology, was recently named to the Editorial Board for Games for Health Journal: Research, Development, and Clinical Applications. The publication is a bimonthly peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the development, use, and applications of game technology for improving physical and mental health and well-being. The journal breaks new ground as the first to address this emerging, widely recognized, and increasingly adopted area of healthcare, and is indexed in MEDLINE; PubMed; PubMed Central; Social Sciences Citation Index®; PsycINFO; and Global Health.

KIN Ph.D. student awarded grant to study strategies aimed at reducing injury rate in youth football

October 15, 2015

Andrew White, Kinesiology doctoral student, was recently awarded with a research grant through the Association for Applied Sport Psychology (AASP). The funds will be used on a project aimed at reducing injury rates in youth football.

White is advised by Diane Wiese-Bjornstal, Ph.D., professor in the School of Kinesiology and director of the Sports Medicine Psychology Lab.

Journal club organized by HSC doctoral student

October 9, 2015

Human Sensorimotor Control Laboratory (HSC) doctoral student Naveen Elangovan is organizing a journal club for the fall semester. Faculty and students are invited to the inaugural meeting on Wednesday, October 14 at 3:30 p.m in the HSC Lab (400 Cooke Hall). The club will discuss Heuer and Lüttgen’s “Robot assistance of motor learning: A neuro-cognitive perspective” from a 2015 issue of Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews.

The event is sponsored by the Center for Clinical Movement Science (CCMS), which is directed by professor Juergen Konczak, Ph.D.

The Huffington Post features Stoffregen’s research on motion sickness

October 7, 2015

StoffregenT_2013 Affordance Perception-Action Laboratory (APAL) director and kinesiology professor Thomas Stoffregen, Ph.D., was interviewed by The Huffington Post on the causes of motion sickness and how it may soon become an issue in the workplace due to the increasing use of digital stimulus.

In the article, “Why Motion Sickness May Become An Issue In The Workplace,” Dr. Stoffregen explains that the feeling of motion sickness is related to the process of adapting to unpredictable movements. Stoffregen also shares his findings on his research connecting gender to motion sickness in new technologies.

“We’ve been looking at possible sex differences in these technologies, and we’ve been learning that they do exist,” he said.

Ji publishes three research articles, has a fourth in-press

October 2, 2015

Dr. Li Li Ji, professor and director in the School of Kinesiology, has a number of recent publications.

His co-authored article in the European Journal of Applied Physiology entitled Avenanthramide supplementation attenuates eccentric exercise-inflicted blood inflammatory markers in women reports the finding that human subjects consuming oats containing a high level of the antioxidant avenanthramides were protected from blood inflammatory response after a rigorous bout of downhill running exercise.

He is the senior author of two published articles:
1) In the journal Oxidative Medicine and Cellular Longevity, the article entitled Exercise-induced neuroprotection of hippocampus in APP/PS1 transgenic mice via upregulation of mitochondrial 8-oxoguanine DNA glycosylase shows that exercise training can mitigate brain oxidative damage in a transgenic mouse model that resembles human Alzheimer’s disease.
2) In the FASEB Journal, the article entitled PGC-1α overexpression by in vivo transfection attenuates mitochondrial deterioration of skeletal muscle caused by immobilization reports that over-expression of a natural gene product called PGC-1 can reverse muscle loss and cell deterioration caused by a period of immobilization.

Dr. Ji also has a review article in press in the American Journal of Physiology: Advances in Physiological Education entitled “Redox signaling in skeletal muscle: role of aging and exercise.”

School of Kinesiology director Li Li Ji presents at International Congress of Stress Biology and Medicine

September 29, 2015

Dr. Li

Li Ji, professor of kinesiology and director of the School of Kinesiology, was an invited speaker at the 7th International Congress of Stress Biology and Medicine (ICSBM), held September 16-19 in Huangshan City, China. Dr. Ji organized a symposium entitled “Stress and Exercise” and gave a lecture, “Skeletal muscle disuse atrophy is caused by discord of redox signaling.” This was the first time the ICSBM has included a symposium on exercise since it was founded in 1998.

U of M/Kinesiology program ranked among top 50 most affordable urban schools for sport management

September 29, 2015

The University of Minnesota/School of Kinesiology has been named among the top 50 most affordable urban schools for sports management in the latest edition of the Sports Management Degree Guide.

The ranking was created using information from the National Center for Education Statistics’ College Navigator database on 158 institutions in the U.S. and Puerto Rico that offer four-year bachelor’s degrees in Sport and/or Fitness Administration/Management and are located in an urban setting. Large urban areas often support professional sports teams and can offer internship opportunities and possible future employment for students in the field of sport management.

“Our sport management major and minor provide students with an affordable educational opportunity to combine their passion for sports with their undergraduate education in a top 20 market with numerous sport industry entities,” says Rayla Allison, J.D., associate director of the School and senior lecturer in sport management. “The sport management undergraduate program is led by outstanding faculty who care about students and have great industry connections.”

The U of M was ranked 42nd out of the 50 most affordable schools. See the guide’s description at http://www.sports-management-degrees.com/50-most-affordable-urban-schools-for-sports-management/.

PhD candidates Koslucher and Haaland will publish with adviser in Experimental Brain Research

September 29, 2015

Kinesiology PhD candidates Frank Koslucher and Eric Haaland, together with their adviser, Prof. Thomas A. Stoffregen, have had an article accepted for publication in Experime ntal Brain Research. The article, entitled “Sex differences in visual performance and postural sway precede sex differences in visually induced motion sickness,” is based on Mr. Koslucher’s research for his PhD thesis project, which was conducted in the Affordance Perception-Action Laboratory in the School of Kinesiology .

“Go Outside and Play” freshman seminar visits Eastcliff via Nice Ride bikes

September 25, 2015

The freshman seminar, “Go Outside and Play!” (REC 1905), recently visited Eastcliff (home to President and Mrs. Kaler) via a nine-mile journey on Nice Ride bicycles. Nice Ride provides this group of freshmen a one-year membership to the bike share program as these students go out and explore the Twin Cities.

Before stopping at Eastcliff for a tour from Mrs. Kaler, the class explored Minneapolis and St. Paul, traveling on the East and West River Road Parkways, the Midtown Greenway, and the Hiawatha Trail. While on their ride, they passed the new US Bank Stadium, Gold Medal Park, the Guthrie, the Mill City Museum, and the Stone Arch Bridge before coming back to campus.

Go Outside and Play! (Freshman Seminar) is designed to introduce University of Minnesota students to the great outdoors! Within the Twin Cities, outstanding agencies and numerous local, state, and national parks provide tremendous resources for community engagement and enrichment right in our backyard.

Through hiking, biking, standup paddleboarding, canoeing, and even a little apple smear in the rain, students learn numerous ways to incorporate healthy, fun, and life-long activities into their lives while understanding the importance of advocating for sustainable natural and environmental resources.

Kinesiology doctoral program jumps into top 10

September 25, 2015

The results of the National Academy of Kinesiology’s 2015 Doctoral Program Review rank the School of Kinesiology tied for sixth (adjusted for faculty size). This is the best ranking the University of Minnesota has ever received (11th – 2005, 19th – 2010).

The Doctoral Program Reviews are conducted in five-year intervals and are based on both faculty productivity, funding, and visibility as well as student selectivity, support, employment, and publication

The School of Kinesiology’s doctoral program offers five different concentrations: biomechanics and neuromotor control, exercise physiology, perceptual-motor control and learning, physical activity and sport science, and sport management.

The National Academy of Kinesiology’s dual purpose is to encourage and promote the study and educational applications of the art and science of human movement and physical activity and to honor by election to its membership persons who have directly or indirectly contributed significantly to the study of and/or application of the art and science of human movement and physical activity.

CEHD News Kinesiology

CEHD News Kinesiology