Faculty member aims to create alliance for Parkinson's research
During a game of tennis with a friend, Tarkesh Singh experienced first-hand the very incident he hopes to make a difference in with his research—an accidental fall by an individual with Parkinson’s disease.
After bouncing the ball to his friend several times, a serve that landed further away caused him to lose his balance and fall over. To this day, Singh often plays the incident over in his head, evaluating and assessing it from the perspective of a sensorimotor neuroscientist.
“I was looking at his eyes and hands, and I could just see he was confused,” said Singh, an assistant professor in the College of Education’s Department of Kinesiology. “He was following the ball with his eyes, but could not make a decision in time to move one way or the other, and then he fell. I feel like this is a big reason why we need to better understand deficits in eye movements in people with Parkinson’s disease and how it relates to deficits in their limb movements.”