From Sept. 1-4, Silvia and Dagmar attended the 2024 BioRob conference in Heidelberg, Germany. They were invited to present at the Workshop on Joint Actions.

On August 26, Vani, Silvia and Sid showcased our portable MAGIC Table at the Outreach Event “The Art of Recovery’ organized at MGH. The joint event for stroke patients, caregivers, clinicians, and researchers was a real experience!

The Action Lab has been host to a series of awards in the past few weeks. A few of the highlights are listed below:

1. Our own long-term lab member from 2018 to 2022, Sabrina Bond, got accepted at Stanford Medical School for an MD/PhD with full funding, tuition and salary. She also got two more acceptances for a MD/PhD with scholarships: at Harvard/MIT and at Northwestern.
2. Our recent post-bac lab member, Sabra Sisler, got accepted at Stanford in Bioengineering. She also received the NSF graduate research fellowship.
3. Our 3-year long undergraduate lab member, Sid Annapragada, received two scholarships to pursue another research CooP in our lab: the Schafer CooP fellowship and also the AJC Research Merit Scholarship.

Congrats to these lab members and let’s keep up the momentum!

Sabra, a postbaccalaureate in the Action Lab, has won the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and will pursue a PhD at Stanford in Neural Engineering. Congrats Sabra!

Mahdi, our card-carrying mechanical engineer, won the first prize in Arts in the ME Research Expo. Here is his beautiful poster on “Manipulating a Bull-Whip to Hit a Target”

As part of the whip project, Jack the Whipper, a professional whip performer, visited the action lab as a subject for a motion capture and kinematic data collection session. By testing the limits of human motor control, we may begin to answer questions on how to apply such complex tasks towards robotics. See the full article here.

For our whip-cracking project, Jack the Whipper, a professional whip-cracking stage performer, visited our lab and we recorded very cool motion capture and kinematic data. It was a blast!

Dagmar received an award for Excellence in Mentoring from Northeastern – below are some happy faces!

From left to right: Mohsen, Dagmar, Helene, and Aleksei

Rashida Nayeem defended her dissertation and leaves for the West Coast to work as Research Scientist at Apple.

In collaboration with Amy Lu, Dagmar published a meta-analysis of balance training: balance can be improved with practice – especially when you can dance along with it ☺. See the news article about the implications of their work here.

Good-bye to Sabrina! After almost 5 years in the Action Lab working as an undergraduate research assistant, Sabrina is heading West to continue her endeavors at Stanford University.

Dagmar and Salah, avid soccer fans, give a neuroscience spin to the ball game in the article “The layers of science behind every World Cup kick”.  Read the full story here.

Our first paper on whip ‘cracking’ – the manipulation of a complex object – was published in Royal Society Open Science and covered in an article in the New York Times. You can read the article at this link.

Good-bye to Reza! He leaves the lab for a tenure-track faculty position in Mechanical Engineering at Northern Arizona University.

The Cup Club (from left to right): Mohsen Sadeghi, Rashida Nayeem, Reza Sharif Razavian, Salah Bazzi.

Rashida received the highly selective Young Scientist award from the Society for Neural Control of Movement and will give a podium presentation at the annual meeting in Dublin, Ireland, on July 26. Congratulations Rashida!

Carissa graduated with a Master’s degree in Biology and already accepted one of her numerous job offers. She will soon start as a Clinical Research Associate at Syneos Health. Congratulations Carissa!

Sabrina, our undergraduate lab member since 2018, graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Behavioral Neuroscience and a GPA of 3.99. It does not get much better. Sabrina also received a record list of awards, ranging from the Goldwater Fellowship, a Rhodes nominee, to the Northeastern University’s President Award for Outstanding Scholarship. Congratulations Sabrina!

Dagmar and Aleksei shared their views on why quadruple jumps are so impressive in elite figure skating. Read the full story here.

Dagmar receives the prestigious $3M NIH-MERIT Award for her basic and translational research achievements on the control of motor skills – “only given to the most outstanding scientists supported by the Institute.”
Read more here.

After a 4-month internship at Facebook/Meta, Rashida is back in our lab. Welcome back Rashida!

Sabrina is a National Nominee for the Rhodes Scholarship. An outstanding honor!

Dagmar received a US Scholar Fulbright fellowship to visit University Tor Vergata in Rome during her sabbatical. She will join Prof. Andrea d’Avella and our former postdoc Marta Russo there.

Sabrina Bond received the prestigious Barry Goldwater fellowship. We are all proud of Sabrina!

Salah Bazzi advanced to a research scientist in the Institute for Experiential Robotics at Northeastern. While he will stay grounded in the Action Lab he will initiate more research links to robotics, his home turf.

Dagmar is covered in a short video about “The Science of Movement”, showing some of our research on ballet dancers with some marvelous pictures of Patrick and Rachele from the Boston Ballet (watch here).