Smart squad
May 11, 2020

By Chandrea Miller / USC Provost

They’ve been called one of the most junior teams to lead a USC collaboration fund center — they, as in, Dr. James M. Finley, Assistant Professor, USC Division of Biokinesiology and Physical Therapy, Dr. Judy Pa and Dr. Sook-Lei Liew, both, Assistant Professors, Department of Neurology, at USC Mark and Mary Stevens Neuroimaging and Informatics Institute.

Together, these early faculty members strive to solve the unsolvable and think the unthinkable in an effort to combat the world’s most insidious and debilitating neurological diseases: Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and stroke.

They conduct their cutting-edge research at the USC SensoriMotor Assessment and Rehabilitation Training in Virtual Reality Center. The USC SMART-VR Center is a multidisciplinary center which brings together world-class investigators across movement science, engineering, neuroscience, and rehabilitation to study and develop virtual reality interventions for neuro-rehabilitation.

Dr. Liew, one of the center’s founders, says her research on stroke aims to personalize treatment since recovery varies greatly from person to person.

“To do this, we’ve been using big data approaches to make models of stroke recovery that account for individual differences across patients based on the individual’s demographics, like age, sex, and how long it’s been since stroke,” Liew said. “From that information, we hope to be able to form reliable predictive models of recovery where, ultimately, you could read someone’s brain scan and get a prognosis for their likely trajectory and how they might respond to different therapies.”

Read the full article at USC Provost.

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