Professor Lena Ting and Assistant Professor J. Lucas McKay, both from the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, are part of an eight-person Emory-based research team that recently received a Synergy II/Nexus Award. Ting is the principal investigator for the project that received the award.

The Synergy II/Nexus award promotes cross-disciplinary collaboration and discovery by including scientists from both Emory University’s Woodruff Health Sciences Center (WHSC) and other faculty across Emory. The award is funded by the WHSC, Emory School of Medicine, the Emory Office of the Provost, and Emory College of Arts and Sciences (ECAS).

Their team’s project is titled: “Mapping the Human ‘Gaitome’: Automated Analysis of Individual-Specific Walking Patterns in Health and Disease.”

The project description provided by the researchers:

“Much about us as individuals is revealed simply by how we walk. When we walk, others may perceive our age, gender, socio-economic status, and mood. Walking speed has been referred to as the ‘fifth vital sign’, associated with overall health. Our objective is to develop novel methods to characterize the human gait-ome, i.e. measure, model, compare, and classify individual-specific walking patterns in health and disease. Akin to the human genome project, this high-risk, high-reward proposal leverages experimental, clinical, and computational work from the collaborators to develop a “sequencing” technique for human gait that. Just as the Human Genome project has enabled us to understand the blueprint of our biology, our Gait-ome project will elucidate the blueprint of our movement patterns. The integration of novel methods and hypothesis across basic science, machine learning, rehabilitation, and movement disorders is necessary to develop a method that can unravel the complex physiological interactions underlying how we move. Ultimately our goals is to identify functional biomarkers to aid in diagnosis of a wide variety of orthopedic, neurological, and psychiatric disorders, and to provide functional targets for surgical, pharmacological, and other interventions that affect gait.“

The full research team pursuing the mapping of the “gaitome” includes:

Gordon Berman, Ph.D. (Emory College of Arts and Sciences)

Christine Esper, M.D. (Emory University School of Medicine)

Stuart Factor, D.O. (Emory University School of Medicine)

Trisha Kesar, P.T., Ph.D. (Emory University School of Medicine)

J. Lucas McKay, M.S.C.R., Ph.D. (Emory University School of Medicine)

Shamim Nemati, Ph.D. (Emory University School of Medicine)

Ilya Nemenman, Ph.D. (Emory College of Arts and Sciences)

Lena Ting, Ph.D. (Emory University School of Medicine)

About the Synergy Award:

The Synergy Awards were created in 2016 to spark new, synergistic interactions among investigators and to enable scientific achievements of the highest quality and impact.

The awards support collaborative projects among faculty throughout the Woodruff Health Sciences Center (WHSC), including Emory University School of Medicine, Rollins School of Public Health, Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing, and all other units in health sciences at Emory.  The awards also support collaborative projects among WHSC faculty and faculty in Emory College.

Since the Synergy Awards were initiated in 2016, more than $3.6 million in funds have been awarded to more than 110 researchers throughout the health sciences, supporting 38 proposals.