Venkata Naga Pradeep Ambati is finishing his 2nd year as a doctoral student in the Interdisciplinary Health Science (IHS) PhD Program. Mr. Ambati is mentored by Dr. Rebecca Reed-Jones, Assistant Professor in the College of Health Sciences, Department of Kinesiology. Mr. Ambati earned a Bachelor's of Science degree in 2007 from Osmania University College of Engineering, Hyderabad, India, and a Master's of Science degree in Biomedical Engineering in 2009 from the University of South Florida. Mr. Ambati was interviewed on March 6th, shortly after his first manuscript was accepted for publication. In the following interview, he discusses the findings and the importance of the research for public health.  Christina Sobin, Ph.D. is the interdisciplinary Health Sciences Ph.D. Program Director.

Ambati, V. N. P., Murray, N., Saucedo, F., Powell, D., & Reed-Jones, R. (2013). Constraining eye movement when redirecting walking trajectories alters turning control in healthy young adults. Experimental Brain Research (in press). DOI 10.1007/s00221-013-3466-8

Christina Sobin: First, I want to say, congratulations on your paper! What did you think when it was accepted?

Pradeep Ambati: This is my first publication. When I joined this PhD program this was one of my main goals, to be a published author, so it was unbelievable. It was months of hard work and it finally paid off, so it felt pretty good.

CS: What was the process like for you?

PA: I was aware of the whole process even though I was never published. I worked closely with people who were publishing a lot during my Master's degree; it's just that I never got actively involved with publishing because I didn't know how important it was. When I got close to finishing my Master's, when I was applying for PhD programs and positions, that is what people were asking for, they wanted to look at my research, and that's when I realized that getting published is very important, as important as acquiring knowledge.

CS: So Pradeep, what are you studying, and why are you interested in this area?

PA: Let me talk about the article that just got published. There were two things we were looking at in this study. The first thing was free gaze and body segment coordination in healthy young adults when walking and turning. The second part of the study was to see the effects of constraining the eye movement in healthy young adults when walking and turning. So basically we studied two conditions and we were trying to see how the healthy young adults coordinate their body and eye movements when walking and turning in these two different situations.

As far as why I am interested in gait, I've been interested in gait ever since I started my Master's degree 5 years back. I was working in a "Falls" clinic during my Master's and I wanted to pursue my PhD in this area. I looked up different researchers who were working in this area and I came across Dr. Reed's research and I found it extremely interesting. She mainly investigates the role of vision in locomotion. So being someone who's interested in injury prevention and locomotion I read her research work. I wanted to be a part of it and that's how I became a part of this PhD program and her project.

CS: What do you think gait tells us about a person?

PA: It tells a lot about people with different (medical) conditions. A healthy person's gait is very different from the gait of persons from a clinical population. You can look at the step length or the frequency of steps, which is called cadence, and you can tell a lot by looking at these simple factors. It is a very important diagnostic measure that people in physical therapy look at when they're diagnosing people with different diseases.

CS: How is your research" interdisciplinary?"

PA: We have a very unique partnership in our lab. My mentor Dr. Reed-Jones is an expert in motor control and motor learning, with interests in biomechanics. I come from a biomedical engineering background with interests in biomechanics. And then there's Nic (Murray) and Fabricio (Saucedo) who are from Kinesiology backgrounds, and they're interested in biomechanics as well. So we have a mishmash of people from different disciplines who work in our lab. Whenever we start a project, regardless of who the main investigator is, we all sit together, we brainstorm and then we refine our research questions together. That's what makes our lab and work interdisciplinary in nature.

CS: What were your findings in your study?

PA: The first part of the study showed us that healthy young adults had an articulated and coordinated whole body turning strategy with the eyes moving in the direction of travel first, followed by the head and trunk. So this was not surprising to us because this was what our first hypothesis predicted. We expected this based on the past research though no one had tested this hypothesis in a real-world walking and turning situation. That's what makes our study innovative and unique. In the second part of the study when we constrained the eye movement of healthy young adults, their body coordination was disrupted and they used what is called an en-bloc technique to turn in the new travel direction. In simple words they moved all the body segments together in the new travel direction. Now if you look at the past research, the en-bloc technique is used by people with movement disorders in real-world situations. So we were able to simulate that en-bloc technique in healthy young adults by constraining their eye movement.

CS: Right, very interesting, so you were able to simulate and manipulate the clinical condition in healthy young adults, for experimental purposes.

PA: Yes.

CS: And why or how do you think your findings are important for the field?

PA: Falling in America is a big issue with older adults and people with clinical conditions like Parkinson's, and stroke, for example. Also, people who experience falls tend to have a fear of falling, which might cause social restriction. People who experience falls and fractures, people who have been treated for falls, usually do not recover well. Others have reported that people over the age of 65 who have hip fractures die within two years because of other complications that follow the fracture. So it is very important to understand the different possible causes of falls. People who are at risk of falls have an increased risk of falling during turning, and that risk of falling during turning actually increases by 8 times in people with Parkinson's disease. So for all these reasons, it is very important for us to study factors that are increasing this risk of falling. That's the reason we are interested in studying turning and the link between vision and body segment coordination. We want to see what exactly is going wrong and causes people to not use the safe turning technique that is used by healthy young adults.

CS: So it sounds like what you are saying is that in some of these clinical conditions, maybe even normal aging, vision restriction might be one of the causes of falling.

PA: So that exactly is what we concluded in our research. When the visual information is cut off to the brain, the brain relies on other sensory modalities to navigate through the world. Now the other sensory modalities like the somatosensory system and the vestibular system, cannot be our first line of defense. Vision helps us identify the different obstacles in the environment and helps us plan our actions well in advance. The other sensory systems are very important but they come into play only when you trip or fall. So imagine that the motions of tripping or falling are the only way you have of accommodating obstacles in the environment. That is not safe at all. So that's why understanding vision in locomotion is very important, and that's what we are doing.

CS: And what will you study next Pradeep?

PA: Well after finishing this research we want to extend the research question to clinical populations, which we have already started doing. We have been able to recruit 8 patients with Parkinson's disease and we are looking at their performance in both of the conditions that I described, and we are in the process of analyzing those results. I'm hoping to present those results at our summer conference and eventually get that published.

CS: Wonderful. Thank you for talking with me today.

PA: Thank you so much for this opportunity. It feels good to get published and be interviewed.

CS: Keep us posted on your progress and whenever you publish, let us know.

PA: I will, thank you.