Brancati and McDonnell Earn IALS Translational Graduate Research Assistantships
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Kinesiology doctoral candidates Ross Brancati and Paul McDonnell have been selected for translational graduate research assistantships by the UMass Amherst Institute for Applied Life Sciences (IALS). The one-year assistantships are awarded to domestic or international graduate students for translational research projects, which IALS defines as work that aims to inform or to develop product candidates, technologies, and services that deliver benefits to human health and well-being.
Brancati, who works in Professor of Kinesiology Katherine Boyer's Musculoskeletal & Orthopedic Biomechanics Lab, was selected as part of the initial Spring 2024-Fall 2024 cohort. During his undergraduate years where he studied biomedical engineering, he had the opportunity to work with motion capture equipment for human movement analysis, sparking his initial interest in this field. As he pursued his master’s degree, he worked in a motion capture lab investigating consequences of movement due to ACL injury, which led to his first full-time position and allowed him to continue this research. This aligned with his passion for working with athletes and providing information to impact rehabilitation. Brancati’s research focuses on identifying subgroups of individuals with running injuries and developing machine learning models that can classify subgroups with wearable sensor data. This approach could provide very valuable information to clinicians for designing more targeted and effective treatments, leading to improved patient outcomes.
McDonnell, a member of the Movement Neuroscience Lab directed by Assistant Professor of Kinesiology Douglas Martini, was recently selected for a Fall 2024-Summer 2025 assistantship, the second IALS assistantship cohort. His interest in the neural control of movement originated during his undergraduate program in biology and physical education, and deepened during his master’s degree, where he was a research assistant in a neurorehabilitation lab, employing transcranial magnetic stimulation to investigate neural mechanisms behind the “cross-education” phenomenon. A full-time research assistantship followed in a balance neuroscience lab investigating sensory reweighting for postural control in people with Parkinson’s Disease. At UMass, McDonnell’s research focuses on cortical mechanisms underlying mobility impairment in older adult fallers. This work holds potential to uncover novel neuroimaging biomarkers for earlier identification of older adults transitioning to a higher fall risk, which is paramount to prevent falls.