Johns Hopkins School of Medicine

Mechanisms of Human Movement Disorders

Movement disorders commonly occur following neurological damage. My laboratory studies the movements of adults and children who have damage or disease of the central nervous system. We are interested in understanding the mechanisms of different types of movement disorders, as well as how and why different treatments improve movement. We are actively studying how new movements are "learned" and what the course of movement recovery following different types brain damage is.

Much of our work has focused on understanding how damage to the cerebellum causes movement incoordination or "ataxia."  We are also studying locomotor disorders in people with stroke as well as visuomotor control and learning in children with autism.

My lab interacts with neurologists, physical therapists, biomedical engineers, and neuroscientists. We employ several techniques to quantify movement including: 3-dimensional tracking and reconstruction of movements, recordings of muscle activity, force plate recordings, and calculation of joint forces and torques. We also use novel devices to test learning including a split belt treadmill, KinArm Robot, and simple computer generated virtual environments. These techniques allow us to make very precise measurements of many different types of movements including: walking, reaching, leg movements, hand movements and standing balance. This also makes it possible to detect very small changes in movement performance over time or with treatment.

Click here to see a cool experiment - Splitbelt Locomotor Adaptation in a Healthy Subject