Impact Stories

What has been the journey to your current research?

In my undergraduate years I was a distance runner, and I went to school with the idea that I would continue running. Over time I realized the training I was doing seemed to be helping my teammates more than it helped me. They were adapting and getting better, but I was not. This led to my interest in exercise physiology, to better understand the body’s responses to physical activity and associated muscle growth, strength and endurance. These experiences — and a wonderful mentor who was also a runner — led me to study endurance runners.

As I progressed to my PhD, I wanted to see how my research could help people beyond endurance athletes. This resulted in my transition toward lab-oriented work, focused on the skeletal muscle system, physical stress and the body’s adaptive mechanisms more broadly. From there, my work naturally grew into a research focus on older adults and aging. I grew up in a household with family members who all worked in nursing homes. At one point during their careers, my grandmother, mother and sister all worked in the same healthcare center. At an early age, my family’s passion for care instilled in me the importance of working with older adults. So, in my lab, we combine my personal passion for skeletal muscle research with a focus on a population I want to help.

How does your lab’s current research contribute to improving patient care for older adults?

In my lab, we examine how skeletal muscle changes with age. If you observe a 20-year-old, 50-year-old and an 80-year-old at a gym, you will see differences in strength, aerobic endurance, agility and balance. A young person will adapt well to physical stress, but it is harder for an older person’s muscles to adapt and handle the same level of stress because our muscles naturally get weaker as we age.

One of the best things we can do with our muscles, of course, is train them. If you apply physiological stress like exercise, the idea is that you combat some of that aging-related weakness. But not everyone who gets older adapts to the same degree. Some may even get worse with training, and they experience a compounding effect where the training is detrimental, and loss of function can occur earlier.

With this understanding, my focus is trying to identify and isolate the mechanisms at work during those aging processes. In particular, we study the neuromuscular mechanisms of skeletal muscle weakness caused by aging and muscle disorders. Central to this work is determining why skeletal muscle in these specific populations may be less stress resistant, resilient and adaptable. Aging is multifactorial, but in my lab, we have focused on a set of specific protein pathways. As a result, my lab has now identified the proteins that change with exercise in young muscle and appear to have a strong relationship with adaptation. Our research has shown those same proteins do not appear to change with training in older muscle.

How does osteopathic medicine’s holistic approach influence your research?

I have been focusing on muscle and the neuromuscular system, and function is a key aspect of what I study. Function is a whole-body component. With aging, many different systems in the body are influenced. Exercise is the same – it has global effects, not only on the muscle, but the cardiovascular system and mental health.

I view these effects in a holistic way, and this is an essential component of osteopathic medicine. I may be focused on muscle, but I know if someone can function better because of  a mechanism I have discovered, if they can adapt better to training and achieve a degree of muscle strength, that means they’re going to maintain function, which will improve their overall health. They will be able to do the activities of daily living longer and enjoy life more fully. As a researcher, my goal is to improve overall health for the individual.

You work alongside other Heritage College researchers at OMNI. What is the value of this interdisciplinary approach?

At OMNI, we are all focused on improving the overall health of older populations, both as individual researchers and as a team. There are researchers under the OMNI umbrella whose clinical work overlaps with my research area, so we collaborate by comparing our studies and sometimes sharing the same equipment. Because we are all within the same Heritage College institute, we can collaborate as a whole, as an entire team. 

How has the Osteopathic Heritage Foundation’s funding advanced your research?

Funding from the Foundation helped support a postdoctoral position that has been integral to my research. Having the right personnel to assist with research is vital to the research process, and without that support it would have been very difficult to advance my goals and collect the level of data that was needed. This individual has been with me for a long time, and the Foundation’s support was not only beneficial to him, me and the lab, it pushed this whole area of study forward.

What is the next step for your research?

I am eager to build upon the significant progress recently made by my lab. We have found very promising results demonstrating improvements in muscle function in mouse models. In these models, we have seen animals that experience improved muscle strength, even though they have never been exercise trained. It’s very exciting.

These results have led me to go deeper and examine both the pathways and which individual proteins we can specifically target. Right now, we are targeting a pathway that can have multiple effects. If we can narrow down which specific protein within the pathway is making this change, then we will have reached the point of drug discovery. We are hopeful that our inquiries will translate into a clinical or larger preclinical model in the future.