Thomas A. Stoffregen, Ph.D., director of the Affordance Perception-Action Laboratory and professor of kinesiology, along with four colleagues, have had an article, “Getting Your Sea Legs,” accepted for publication in PLOS ONE, an international, peer-reviewed, open-access, online publication that features reports of original research from all disciplines within science and medicine.
The article reports research conducted at the beginning of the Spring 2012 voyage of Semester at Sea, and was conducted on board the M/V Explorer as it travelled from the Bahamas to the Commonwealth of Dominica. The research team conducted the first controlled experiments relating body sway to the processes by which novice mariners “get their sea legs.”

Stoffregen’s co-authors on the article are Fu-Chen Chen, Manuel Varlet, Cristina Alcantara, and Benoit G. Bardy. Fu-Chen Chen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Recreation Sport & Health Promotion, National Pingtung University of Science and Technology, Taiwan. He received the PhD in Kinesiology from the University of Minnesota, where his advisor was Mike Wade. Drs. Varlet and Bardy are in the Faculty of Sport Sciences at the University of Montpellier-1, France. Dr. Bardy is also a member of the Institut Universitaire de France, in Paris. Cristina Alcantara is a PhD candidate in the School of Physical Education and Sport at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil.
The journal impact factor was 4.1 in 2011. In 2009, PLOS ONE received the Publishing Innovation Award of the Association for Learned and Professional Society Publishers in recognition of a “truly innovative approach to any aspect of publication as adjudged from originality and innovative qualities, together with utility, benefit to the community and long term prospects”.