Associate

Biomechanics Practice (Phoenix, AZ)

Exponent (Menlo Park, CA)

I study the neural mechanisms used in coordinating muscles to maintain upright stance in the face of balance perturbations.

My research aims to understand how humans use sensory information to coordinate their muscles to maintain standing balance. By integrating experimental data analysis with model simulations, I have identified a simple yet robust feedback transformation that forms the temporal pattern of muscle activity from feedback signals related to center-of-mass acceleration, velocity, and displacement. I then used this feedback law to understand how we learn new balance tasks. With repeated exposure to a balance perturbation, humans gradually navigate toward the optimal muscle activation pattern based on a trade-off between task performance (minimizing postural sway) and energetic efficiency (minimizing total muscle activation).