Students, faculty and staff got a taste of the findings from AHS’ budding student researchers during the AHS Undergraduate Research Expo
Kinesiology juniors Elizabeth Martinez, center, and Aubrey Cervantes, left, present their research at the AHS Undergrad Research Expo (Photo by Ethan Simmons)
For a freshman at the College of Applied Health Sciences, Saiesha Bollapragada’s research portfolio is impressive.
At last week’s Undergraduate Research Symposium, the I-Health major got to present the results from her first research project, “Public Health Preparedness Among UIUC Students During Extreme Heat Conditions,” where she examined students’ awareness and handling of severe heat in the spring semester.
She completed her study with a push from Students Pursuing Applications, Research and Knowledge, or SPARK, an AHS program that jump-starts incoming undergraduate students research experiences by pairing them with professors in the college. Bollapragada was placed with Recreation, Sport, and Tourism Associate Professor Mariela Fernandez, whose experience with urban environmental injustices fit her research topic perfectly.
“Professor Fernandez motivated me to start this project on my own,” Bollapragada said. “There’s a lot more reading involved than I thought there was, it was a lot of work preparing for the symposium, but if it’s something you’re interested in it’s a fun process.”
Students, faculty and staff got a taste of the findings from AHS’ budding student researchers during the AHS Undergraduate Research Expo at Huff Hall on Wednesday, April 24, where a roster of undergraduates gave poster presentations on a diverse range of research topics.
Many students spearheaded their own research projects with significant support and guidance from faculty and graduate students. Others, like a group of Speech and Hearing Science students from the Intellectual DisAbilities Communication Lab led by Associate Professor Marie Moore Channell, provided updates on long-range research projects they’ve assisted with on campus.
Three SHS seniors, Emma Mueller, Abigail Keasler and Liz Gremer, presented initial findings from their glimpse into the Speech Accessibility Project, an ongoing research endeavor looking to make voice recognition software—such as Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa—more accessible for people with different speech patterns.
Each of the students has helped recruit participants with Down syndrome or aided vocal transcriptions from the samples they’ve collected. Under the leadership of Channell, the lab hopes to collect 240,000 voice samples from 400 participants.
“Our poster looked into the recruiting process with that population and took a look at patterns of articulation differences exhibited by individuals with Down syndrome,” said Mueller, who transcribed vocal samples for the project.
All three of the students met in Channell’s lab, and immediately found research responsibilities once the Down syndrome portion of the project came under Channell’s purview.
“It’s been very rewarding, very interesting and very impactful,” Keasler said. “A lot of families in meetings or over the phone say, ‘Siri doesn’t really understand what we’re trying to say,’ so this is very important and I can’t wait to see the results of it.”
Coming to a project affiliated with SHS with “so much publicity and so much money coming in is encouraging,” said Gremer, who has helped recruit participants and set up their first meetings for collecting voice samples.
AHS student programs, such as the first-generation focused Mannie L. Jackson Illinois Academic Enrichment and Leadership Program (I-LEAP), were well represented in the research symposium. I-LEAP juniors Elizabeth Martinez and Aubrey Cervantes, both studying kinesiology, brought results from their research collaboration on high-intensity interval training.
Working within KCH Professor Steve Petruzzello’s Exercise Psychophysiology Lab, the pair analyzed 25 participants’ emotional responses to high-intensity exercise, compared with their scores and symptoms of several mental health qualities: namely anxiety, depression and neuroticism.
“We were looking at exercise adherence—how can we get more people to get more active—and we were really interested in HIIT exercise, so we put it all together in one research project,” Cervantes said.
What they found: Participants with more symptoms of depression reported more negative affect responses during the HIIT exercise, while anxiety and neuroticism didn’t show significant predictive power, they said.
“This is my first hands-on [study] that I can call my own and Aubrey’s,” said Martinez, who’s applying to physical therapy schools. “My favorite part is meeting with the participants. It’s so fun getting to know everyone, even if there’s a lot more hours behind the desk just plugging and chugging data.”
Revamped online degrees are expected to expand the accessibility of AHS programs worldwide, reaching new students from underrepresented and nontraditional backgrounds
RST interim department head Bill Stewart, left, chats with MHA director Lynne Barnes and MPH director Pedro Hallal (Photo by Ethan Simmons)
Three master’s programs in the College of Applied Health Sciences are undergoing transformations for the digital age.
After receiving a $2.035 million award from the University of Illinois Investment for Growth program, AHS faculty, administrators and industry partners will collaborate to create online versions of the Master of Public Health and Master of Health Administration degrees. Additionally, the Master of Recreation, Sport and Tourism online degree will be restructured into three specialized programs: recreation and park management, sport management and administration, and tourism and event management.
The revamped online degrees are expected to expand the accessibility of AHS programs worldwide, reaching new students from underrepresented and nontraditional backgrounds.
“Going global has been a priority of this university for years,” said Pedro Hallal, Alvin M. and Ruth L. Sandall professor in the Department of Kinesiology and Community Health and director of the MPH program. “So now going global is a priority of this program as well.”
The addition of “stackable certificates” across each discipline will attract nontraditional students looking to boost their knowledge as well as mid-career professionals seeking expertise in their chosen industry.
Each program is committed to including new voices in their online instructional material, mainly experienced professionals working in the respective fields.
“It’ll be a nice blend,” said Lynne Barnes, the longtime top Carle Foundation Hospital administrator who was hired as director of the MHA program this fall. “We’ll have professors who really understand the knowledge base of the field, and we’ll also have clinical people who are working in the field doing the teaching, just like we do for the in-person program.”
The creation of new online master’s degree formats will start with collaboration with AHS’ online learning team. The online MPH program and restructured RST online master’s degrees will begin enrolling students in fall 2025; the online MHA program will debut in fall 2026.
“We’re taking the ‘growth’ term very seriously,” said Professor Bill Stewart, interim department head for RST. “This is a long-term investment for us, not just a one-off thing.”
MPH: ‘The perfect storm’ for growth
To populations around the globe, the COVID-19 pandemic was a clarion call to the vital importance of public health infrastructure.
The awakening clearly reached young people pondering their life paths: According to data from the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health, applications to public health graduate degree programs increased 40 percent from 2020 to 2021.
“It’s so much easier now to choose a career related to public health,” said KCH Associate Professor Andi Schwingel, who is working alongside Hallal in developing the online coursework.
“Going global has been a priority of this university for years. So now going global is a priority of this program as well.”
Pedro Hallal
HK Professor, director of the MPH program
For the University of Illinois’ MPH program, the decision to create an online program is also a matter of maturity, Hallal said. Four years have elapsed since the program obtained accreditation from the Council on Education for Public Health.
“Some people in your neighborhood will add a security camera, and you don’t think it’s important until your house gets robbed, and then you see, ‘Oh, I needed that camera,’” Hallal said. “I think that is exactly what happened with public health.
“It was the perfect storm for our time to grow.”
The work ahead will be rigorous, with 20-plus courses awaiting development. Faculty plan to work with external partners, such as public health professionals, to create new course content. And it will be suited to the future landscape of public health, Hallal said: How might climate change and global warming transform health needs? How can we address the coexistence of infectious diseases with chronic conditions, like hypertension and diabetes?
A target for the MPH online expansion is the non-traditional student population. The MPH program will offer six certificates: epidemiology, biostatistics, public health, one health, physical activity and health and health promotion.
“It’s the time for us to reach nontraditional students, we feel ready for it,” Schwingel said. “We want to keep the rigor, the quality that we’ve been giving students in their residential program to the online space as well.”
MHA: Making health administration accessible
The MHA program at Illinois is designed to prepare students for leadership in the healthcare industry.
What the MHA program has recently observed, according to KCH Assistant Professor Mina Raj, is an influx of requests for an online equivalent, especially among mid-career healthcare administrators.
“The pandemic has made salient how important the healthcare system is, and how important it is to have administrators who can respond to public health emergencies and other unpredictable situations,” Raj said.
The overriding goal for the online degree is accessibility, Raj said: What material can be packaged into a four-week or eight-week course? The MHA online degree will offer three professional certificates: health finance, healthcare quality and health informatics.
“I think for this group of professionals it’s really about giving them the context and rationale behind why certain decisions are made as administrators or within a healthcare organization, as well as the tools to anticipate the impacts or consequences of various administrative decisions,” Raj said. “We have faculty with different expertise, different professional backgrounds, and everyone is excited to teach these courses.”
The work has already begun for Barnes, who wants to incorporate seasoned industry experts into course content. Barnes came to the university after retiring from a 45-year career at Carle Foundation Hospital.
“I hope to use real clinicians, people doing the work like at Christie Clinic, Carle and OSF Healthcare to be part of the lectures, so that the students who are online, all over the world and all over the United States experience instruction through people who are actually doing the work,” Barnes said.
RST: Degrees for specialized industries
The Department of Recreation, Sport and Tourism has been a leader in online education, debuting the first online master’s program in the discipline back in 2008.
But there wasn’t much fanfare, Stewart said. Online degrees were seen as “second-class programs” two decades ago.
“We were there at the beginning of the front to move online learning into a respectable degree process of education,” Stewart said.
Today, recreation, sport and tourism combine for an estimated $90 billion global set of industries. The pandemic resulted in a surge of public interest in leisure time and nature exploration, opening up new opportunities for professionals in the field, Stewart said.
“[RST] is about what we do in our free time to extend who we are and add value to our lives,” Stewart said. “We’ve come to embrace our needs for leisure-time activities in the last two years in ways that enhance our well-being and nurture our souls.”
The upcoming split of the current online master’s program into three tracks is a response to internal and external trends. Enrollment in the online MS in RST has plateaued in recent years, while other institutions have introduced their own online degrees in the discipline.
Online degrees were seen as “second-class programs” two decades ago, but no longer, said Bill Stewart, center. (Photo by Ethan Simmons)
Meanwhile, the demands of the industry have become more specialized over time.
“There’s still a need for the generalist degree, but because of the growth, we are finding professionals out there who need more help with the specialty,” Stewart said.
Students and mid-career professionals will be able to enroll in a new slate of RST certificates in high-demand topics, including inclusive design, agricultural tourism, sport analytics, e-sport administration, and diversity, equity and inclusion.
The department is in the process of searching for a director of the RST online program, Stewart said, while tapping into a vast network of alumni to help develop new course content.
“Our alumni value the friends and faculty they came to know as students and find various ways to give back to the department,” Stewart said. “Many of our alums are leading remarkable careers in contexts related to recreation, sport and tourism; they readily share their expertise through assistance in course development, guest lectures, creating internship opportunities for our current students, and in some cases, teaching classes for us.
“Our students come here because they care about making people feel better, their well-being, their sense of community and health. They want to give back to the community and they want to give back to the department that gave them this path in life.”
The College of Applied Health Sciences boasts a diverse student body in which 33 percent of the students belong to historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups and 149 students are from other countries
Jemimah Bakare, right, Emmanuel Dubure and Byron Juma, left, are parts of a growing contingent of Illinois students from Africa (Photo by Michelle Hassel)
The Republic of Ghana has the second-largest population in West Africa. Until recently, Emmanuel Dubure was one of its more than 32 million inhabitants. He said the part of the country where he grew up faces many health challenges, and he wanted to develop the expertise to make a difference. He chose to study in the United States, he said, because “the U.S. has the best educational system at the graduate level and is a hub for research and experts in many fields.”
Dubure aspires to work at the community level to improve health back home. He learned of Illinois on LinkedIn and liked the idea of obtaining his master’s degree in community health from a well-ranked Research 1 university.
“Most importantly, I chose to come here because the College of Applied Health Sciences had faculty doing good research in my area of interest, which is the use of nutrition education to improve health, particularly in relation to chronic conditions,” he said.
Dubure described his experience at Illinois as “amazing” and said he would strongly recommend it to other international students.
“I have met a lot of wonderful people, both students and professors. The environment here is very stimulating and supportive of learning,” he said. “AHS is very multicultural, which gives you an opportunity to learn about different cultures. It also helps you feel at home because you meet other people from your home country.”
A common sense of humanity
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign boasts one of the largest international student populations among public institutions in the United States. According to the university’s Vision 2030 Global Strategy document, the first international students arrived on campus just four years after the university was founded. In 1907, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign became the first university in the nation to create the position of international student advisor, an early recognition of the benefits of worldwide perspectives in education and scholarship.
Marta Schneider, associate director for global communication at Illinois International, said the university’s global strategy puts a high priority on intentional engagement in Global South countries.
“The number of students from the African continent have indeed been increasing, with Nigeria being among the top 10 represented countries at Illinois in 2021 and 2022,” she said. “The university also is committing resources to increasing ties with Latin America and underrepresented parts of Asia.”
Bill Stewart, interim head of the Department of Recreation, Sport and Tourism, thinks encouraging international enrollments is a good idea.
“A world-class university needs a world-class student body to prepare future professionals for careers that will involve advancing relationships across international and cultural boundaries,” he said. “International students elevate class discussions and activities and research programs by sharing insights and cultural values.”
As a result, he adds, domestic students often better understand cultural differences and similarities and reflect on their own cultural heritage. International students can increase understanding of a common sense of humanity.
This has certainly been the case for Sandraluz Lara-Cinisomo, associate professor of kinesiology and community health. Her research addresses disparities in the mental health of women and mothers in different racial, ethnic and immigrant groups and the military. In her Laboratory for Emotion and Stress Assessment, she has graduate students from Nigeria, Ethiopia and The Republic of The Gambia. She said the insights that international students provide on perinatal mental health disparities are critical for addressing the diverse needs of mothers not only globally but also within the United States.
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is a prestigious institution, and I am extremely proud of being a student here. I wouldn’t want other international students to miss out on these crucial opportunities.
MaryEllen Mendy
Doctoral candidate, Community Health
“International students have lived experiences that are valuable when considering risk factors for perinatal mental health, barriers to care and innovative strategies that respect diverse communities’ cultural and linguistic needs,” Lara-Cinisomo said.
Domestic students also benefit from learning, she added, that while public health crises abroad may appear identical to ones in the United States, they may actually involve layers of complex cultural and political systems that aren’t observed here.
One of Lara-Cinisomo’s mentees, Mary Ellen Mendy, hails from the smallest country within mainland Africa, the Republic of The Gambia. Women in The Gambia face many challenges to their physical and mental health. After completing her Ph.D. in community health, Mendy hopes to apply all that she has learned from this program and her Master of Public Health program at the University of Illinois Springfield to making a difference back home.
“The skills I am developing are already paving the way for my future career as a researcher,” Mendy said. “I have received so much training in the Laboratory for Emotion and Stress Assessment lab, which I greatly value.”
Mendy said she already has recommended the program to friends back in The Gambia: “The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is a prestigious institution, and I am extremely proud of being a student here. I wouldn’t want other international students to miss out on these crucial opportunities.”
A wholehearted recommendation
Like their domestic colleagues, international students also benefit from the exposure to different cultures. Kenyan student Byron Juma said he has seen the months fly by as he’s grown “leaps and bounds” from his interactions with students from different parts of the world.
“I have taken classes from different departments and appreciated the opportunities to interact with students from diverse academic and social backgrounds and nationalities,” he said. “Such interactions have enriched my academic life and allowed me to view my research from different perspectives. Furthermore, these interactions have allowed me to learn and appreciate other cultures, thus building my emotional and social intelligence.”
Juma, who is pursuing a Ph.D. in recreation, sport and tourism, has researched doping in sport in Africa and Europe. The unique closed-league system and heavy commercialization of sport in the United States offered an exciting new perspective for his research. The possibility of studying with RST Assistant Professor Julian Woolf, one of the world’s leading scholars on the topic, was also enticing.
“I firmly believe that AHS has some of the best faculty in the country,” Juma said. “Getting a degree in the college counts as a prestigious achievement.”
Juma also noted that the outstanding diversity of the student body in AHS, where 33 percent of the students belong to historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups and 149 students are from other countries, makes it easy to feel at home. Nigerian student Jemimah Bakare, who is pursuing a master’s degree in community health, agrees.
“The campus’ commitment to diversity and inclusion makes it an attractive choice for an international student,” she said. “The sense of belonging and the opportunities for cultural exchange are enriching aspects of the university experience that I believe are essential for personal growth and academic success.”
Bakare’s interests focus on the management of type 2 diabetes and chronic kidney disease in older adults. She was drawn to the strong academic and research reputation of the campus and the college as well as the student body diversity.
“The academic rigor and quality of instruction have exceeded my expectations,” she said. “Furthermore, the university’s emphasis on research and practical application of knowledge has provided me with valuable hands-on experiences that will undoubtedly contribute to my future career in community health.”
Because of this combination of academic excellence, diversity and translational research opportunities, Bakare would “wholeheartedly” recommend the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the College of Applied Health Sciences to other Nigerian students. In addition, she said, the support services and resources available to international students at the university help to ensure a smooth transition to life in the United States.
MedFest was set up to provide free medical screenings for Special Olympics athletes.
A small team of student audiologists-in-training conducted hearing examinations for nearly 100 athletes (Photo provided)
The stage was set at Wintrust Sports Complex in the Village of Bedford Park—a suburb of Chicago—when nearly 600 Special Olympics athletes from across the state began to stream in.
With the help of a substantial volunteer staff, including more than 25 students from the College of Applied Health Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, many of the athletes left the facility ready to play.
As part of the 22nd annual “MedFest” event, hundreds descended on Bedford Park to help athletes from Special Olympics Illinois receive their physical certifications to compete in the state.
In the most recent edition, hosted on Nov. 30, students from the Departments of Speech and Hearing Science and Recreation, Sport and Tourism took time out of their fall break from classes to help the event run smoothly.
A small team of student audiologists-in-training conducted hearing examinations for nearly 100 athletes, while 15 RST students helped from the event management side, signing in the athletes and directing them to the right locations.
“You can tell that they got so comfortable and were having a blast, talking with athletes and interacting with them,” said Melissa Garritano, senior director of Special Olympics Illinois region D, which covers the Chicagoland area. “Thinking back to when I was at the U. of I., I wish I would’ve done stuff like this. They drove up two hours to spend the day with us—the athletes loved them.”
The connection stemmed from Bedford Park’s budding partnership with the College of AHS. The Department of Recreation, Sport and Tourism has a grant with the Village of Bedford Park, which heavily invested in the Wintrust Sports Complex. The project-heavy facility hosts community events on a regular basis, atop of its normal sports operations.
Joe Ronovsky, chief business officer of Village of Bedford Park, is a two-time RST graduate. He saw that the complex could serve as a real-world “lab setting” for community engagement projects led by RST faculty and students.
“Frankly, it’s kind of a one-stop shop, and it’s an opportunity for me as a teacher to show how all these things interact with each other,” said RST Clinical Associate Professor Michael Raycraft.
MedFest was set up to provide free medical screenings for Special Olympics athletes. Wintrust Sports Complex at Bedford Park began partnering with Special Olympics Illinois about a year and a half ago.
“Their facility is unbelievable,” Garritano said. She met Raycraft through their common connections to the Wintrust Complex.
Nicole Dudek, a junior in the RST program, was taken aback by the organizational strength and scale of the event. She started her day at MedFest positioned at the height and weight station, an entry point for many of the athletes.
When students showed up around 8:30 a.m., the Special Olympics staff had the gear and answers: nametags, T-shirts, and where each student would be working within the complex.
“From the event management side of things, you could tell how well-run this event was start to finish,” Dudek said. “It helped to have such a large open space and so many volunteers, and everyone worked well together with the sole goal to help these students get their necessary medical certifications.”
The “noisy, upbeat” energy of the event bolstered the volunteer experience for RST senior Carson Bounds.
“As you could imagine, with 450 kids taking a field trip to a large indoor sport facility during a school day, they all were quite excited to be there,” Bounds said.
Third-year audiology student Yadira Espinoza appreciated the pre-event workshop on how to work with a special needs population.
“Since it was a Special Olympics event, it was important for us to know what to expect; that every kid will be different depending on their needs and accommodations,” she said.
The athletes—ranging from elementary schoolers to full-grown adults—had a variety of responses to the hearing tests. Espinoza used her bilingual fluency to help some of the families who only spoke Spanish, she said.
“These opportunities are very important because they provide more or confirm what we learn in the classroom. It’s different to work with someone who may have Down syndrome or a speech delay; seeing it firsthand really makes a difference and puts you in a situation to put your critical thinking in place,” she said.
Students from RST and SHS teamed up at MedFast (Photo provided)
SHS audiology students are regular volunteers in the community, typically getting out for a handful of outreach events per semester, such as a recent visit to the ClarkLindsey retirement community in Urbana.
Clinical associate professor Sadie Braun supervised the audiology students in the volunteer event. Seeing her students persist with the athletes who didn’t respond right away to testing made the experience worthwhile.
“The athlete got this sense of pride when they were doing what we were asking them to do,” Braun said.
“It was awesome and unique to bring the U of I [audiology] crew up,” Garritano added. “Some of those athletes they got to see may have never had a hearing test in their life.”
Ronovsky thanked Raycraft and Village of Bedford Park President David Brady for tying together all the stakeholders in November’s event.
“Seeing the large group of RST and Speech and Hearing Science students volunteering at MedFest really tied together the meaning of community we’re trying to build at the Wintrust Sports Complex, in Bedford Park and throughout the state of Illinois,” Ronovsky said. “These Illini students are the next leaders in our communities.”
Pilot grants reignite Chad Symposium, fostering research collaboration and innovation
KCH Associate Professor Naiman Khan’s presentation was titled “Role of Omega-3 Lipid Metabolites in Obesity and Cognitive Function” (Photo by Lisa Bralts)
The first Center for Health, Aging, and Disability (CHAD) symposium since 2017 was a celebration of the research accomplished with the help of the Pilot Grant Program.
Three researchers from the College of Applied Health Sciences—Naiman Khan, an associate professor in Kinesiology and Community Health; Brian Monson, an assistant professor in Speech and Hearing Science, and Sharon Zou, an assistant professor in Recreation, Sport and Tourism, made a point of thanking CHAD’s grants for helping launch their studies.
Khan, whose presentation was titled “Role of Omega-3 Lipid Metabolites in Obesity and Cognitive Function,” said CHAD’s funding was vital to his work.
“CHAD was really helpful in us starting a new line of engagement of research,” he said.
CHAD director Jeff Woods, AHS’ associate dean for research, said to date, 38 pilot grants have been awarded since CHAD was launched in 2010, with $860,000 awarded to AHS researchers for pilot research. Woods described CHAD’s role as “work at the bookends of medicine … with the goal of improving people’s lives.”
“CHAD pilot grants are really important for junior faculty,” Zou said.
And the payoff has been well worth it, Woods said, citing the return on investment as approximately $16 in external funding to $1 in CHAD funding.
Zou’s presentation was titled “Exploring an Efficient and Equitable Entrance Fee for Public Lands: A Community-based investigation in the Indiana Dunes National Park.”
“I study how people have fun,” Zou said, explaining that it was vital for public parks and other tourism industries to build a sustainable revenue model and not to rely on decreasing funding from state and federal sources.
The primary purpose of Zou’s study was to “understand visitors’ and surrounding community residents’ perceptions of Indiana Dunes National Park user fees to inform a fee structure that balances revenue generation and equitable access.”
During and after the COVID-19 pandemic, Zou said, “parks saw explosions of people visiting.” While that was great for parks in terms of revenue, it also led to increasing operation costs at a time when government funding for these sites is being reduced.
“The specific goal is to find out how visitors see the park fees, and are they fair?,” Zou said.
The RST researcher said her preliminary findings indicate there was no consensus from study participants on what “fair” means, and that tension between fairness principles partly explains the longstanding controversy and debate on public land user fees.
Khan’s presentation focused on how poor lifestyle choices can predict an early onset of dementia, noting that obesity worldwide has increased threefold since the 1980s. The KCH researcher said his research, in conjunction with Aditi Das of Georgia Tech, suggested that the a deficiencyin the hormone dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA)—which has been reported to have beneficial effects on obesity, diabetes mellitus, and serum lipids in animals—was associated with individuals with a body-mass index (BMI) of 25 or higher, which is classified as obese.
“BMI is inversely connected to cognitive function,” Khan said. “Only in obese individuals do we see DHEA increase in circulation.” Khan said his preliminary results found:
Circulating Omega-3 metabolites were higher among persons with higher weight status and the levels were associated with degree of fat mass
Circulating metabolites inversely associated with cognitive function
Only observed among persons with overweight and obesity
Selectively associated with hippocampal function
Implications for memory function
Khan said his overarching goal was to “develop effective lifestyle approaches to improve cognitive function.”
SHS’ Monson discussed his study called “Capturing Prenatal Auditory Experience.”
“If there was a pregnant woman in this audience, that baby would be hearing my voice, and perhaps making judgments,” he said, drawing laughter from the gathering. “How do we know? Because full-term newborns come to the world with memories of what they’ve heard, including the mother’s voice.”
In utero, Monson explained, was a unique acoustic environment. When preterm infants are delivered, they are placed into incubators, which rapidly changed the sound profile, he said. The consequences of those changes include increased risk for sensorineural hearing loss, auditory neuropathy, language and speech developmental delays, auditory attention deficits and auditory processing disorder.
Monson’s study involved a group of pregnant women wearing a LENA listening device twice a week during the third trimester, while the device was placed into cribs of very preterm infants at Carle Foundation Hospital three times a week through their stay in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU).
“Fetuses are getting 2.5 hours a day of speech exposure vs. 32 minutes a day for very preterm infants,” he said. “It’s an alarming difference to me.” NICU infants may incur a deficit of about 150 hours of speech exposure over the course of the preterm period, he explained.
One of the possible mitigation strategies for very preterm infants could be to provide meaningful targets (about three hours a day of speech exposure) to optimize auditory exposures in NICU settings.
“The maternal heartbeat is never turned off in utero,” he said. “The maternal heartbeat is never turned on in NICU.”
Following the CHAD Pilot Grant success stories, Wendy Rogers, the Shahid and Ann Carlson Khan Professor of Applied Health Sciences, talked about the work of Collaborations in Health, Aging, Research, & Technology (CHART).
CHART’s mission is to enable successful aging through:
Fundamental research
Advanced technology development
Education of researchers, developers, healthcare professionals, older adults
Guidance for policy decision-making
Translation of these efforts to positively affect the lives of older adults
CHART was the first research theme of the College of Applied Health Sciences and boasts the development of the McKechnie Family LIFE Home, an interdisciplinary research facility and simulated home environment that helps promote community engagement, industry partnerships, healthcare collaborations and faculty innovation.
Also part of the symposium was the introduction of a new AHS research theme called CARD (Collaborations in the Advancement of Research on Disability), led by KCH Associate Professor Laura Rice and KCH Professor John Kosciulek. CARD is focused on enhancing the health and quality of life of people with disabilities—through research that addresses critical gaps in disability-related knowledge and outreach that engages individuals with disabilities.
CARD’s short-term goals include:
Develop a collaborative working group
Develop communication strategies
Establish a steering committee of stakeholders
Develop and implement outreach and engagement events
Longer-term goals include:
Host a bi-annual research symposium
Develop a “toolkit” for UIUC faculty to support the performance of disability-related research in the Champaign-Urbana area
Respond to disability-related funding opportunities
Establish a competitive program to provide supplemental funding to support ongoing disability research among junior faculty
Host a seminar series with external experts
Establish a research training program for students registered with DRES interested in doing research
Support the development of new research registries and/or expansion of current registries
The first CARD meeting is set for March 22.
In kicking off the symposium, AHS Dean Cheryl Hanley-Maxwell said CHAD was “one of the biggest attractions” of her decision to come to Illinois and lead the college.
“When I thought about CHAD, I thought it’d be interesting to lead a college that has this kind of momentum to it, and I’ve been proven correct, year after year,” she said. “CHAD provides students with real-world engagement, and plays an absolutely critical role in their professional development.”
Woods agreed.
“We’re helping put the next generation of scientists into the field.”
