Neural and behavioral indices of balance performance in individuals with sensory loss

April 2023: PhD candidate Brittani Morris was awarded a Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award (Individual Predoctoral Fellowship to Promote Diversity in Health-Related Research (Parent F31-Diversity). 

This project, which will also serve as Brittani’s dissertation research, aims to analyze balance performance and its relationship to internetwork functional connectivity in individuals with vestibular hypofunction or unilateral hearing loss.

In this project, we will characterize balance performance using a variety of balance measures (Aim 1), collect resting-state fMRI data to compare inter-network connectivity between the groups (Aim 2), and then examine the extent to which network connectivity measures explain the balance performance (Aim 3).