Dr. Juergen Konczak, Kinesiology professor of biomechanics, has had a busy and productive academic year. Here are some of the highlights:
In February, Dr. Konczak participated in a national NIH Taskforce on Childhood Motor Disorders. The meeting took place at the National Institutes of Health in Rockville, MD. Nearly 50 national and international experts convened for two days to make concrete recommendations toward identifying new technologies and methods for improving the diagnosis and quantification of motor disorders in children.
Dr. Konczak has been invited to contribute to a special issue of Frontiers in Neuroscience on Autism: The Movement Perspective. Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are portrayed as cognitive and social disorders. The issue will focus on evidence indicating that profound movement and sensory differences exist in ASD that can be characterized in a way that is conducive with new behavioral treatments, an advantage over observational inventories.
In a collaboration with colleagues at the Italian Institute of Technology, Dr. Konczak published a project in Journal of Neurophysiology that investigates how haptic information from the two hands is shared across the hemispheres of the brain when exploring an single object. Results indicate that the brain does not combine the information from both hands, but rather selects either the left and right hand information in order to make judgments about the property of an object. For more information, visit: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22031771