Good Morning, Baltimore!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/davies/5047790/



We are overjoyed to announce that Steven has accepted a position as a postdoc at



Johns Hopkins University



in Baltimore, Maryland. Hooray! He will be working with:



Dr. Allison Okamura and Dr. Amy Bastian



His future lab is called the Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics and he will be working on a project in rehabilitation robotics that combines mechanical engineering with neuroscience--Steven's two professional loves. To get technical, he will use "a planar robotic exoskeleton device to collect behavioral data and form computational models of upper limb movement in neurologically intact and cerebellar subjects. The long term goal is to identify the neural deficiencies in upper limb reaching movements in cerebellar patients and design therapies and devices for assisting them in rehabilitation." And if you can believe it, to Steven this sounds like the funnest thing in the world. : )




We are very excited to be moving to Baltimore, and not just because it's a little cheaper and warmer than Boston. We will certainly miss our good friends in Cambridge (and everywhere else, of course), but we have felt very guided by God throughout this whole process, and are sure this is the place for us. What a relief to have this decision finally made (and with even one week to spare before we have to move out!).




We're grateful for all your support, dear friends and family. We would love to have you come visit (and we'll finally have room to host you--hooray!). We'll be less than an hour and a half from Washington, DC, so we expect you to do your civic duty and see the nation's capital while you stay with us!

Piled Higher and Deeper

I'm pleased to announce that Dr. Steven Knight Charles successfully defended his PhD Thesis today with a time of 6 years 10 months and 6 days (including the 3 years he spent "training" during his Master's work). At the finish line he was rewarded with an aluminum foil PhD medal, a warming blanket, and banana, apple, and water to help him regain the vitamins and hydration he lost during this mega-marathon. As you can see, a PhD is well worth it!

Here are the members of Steven's committee (from left to right). Don't let their congenial smiles fool you--they made sure to put Steven sufficiently through the ringer. Seriously, we are very grateful for their support and attention.

Thesis Advisor and Committee Chairman:Neville Hogan, Professor, Mechanical Engineering, Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT

Committee Members:Emilio Bizzi, Institute Professor, MITRobert Howe, Professor, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard UniversityPeter L. Strick, Professor, Neurobiology, Psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh

Steven's labmates were extremely kind and even brought doughnuts and coffee to the defense to keep the committee members at bay. : ) Here's how we party at MIT--it's not a celebration unless you're surrounded by machines and lab equipment

Thanks for the cake, Newman Lab. We couldn't be more proud of Dr. Charles!

And for the nerd in you, we present Steven's abstract:

Thesis Defense:

It’s All in the Wrist: A Quantitative Characterization of Human Wrist Control

Steven Charles
MIT Miller Room (1-114)
Thursday, July 10th, 10 am

Over the past three decades, much research in motor neuroscience has focused on understanding how humans make coordinated reaching movements, yielding valuable insight into the planning and control of reaching movements, and establishing a foundation for robot-assisted rehabilitation. The goal of my doctoral research has been to provide a quantitative characterization of humans’ wrist rotations, paving the way for intelligent robot-assisted wrist rehabilitation. More specifically, my research has characterized the kinematics and dynamics of wrist rotations, and discussed implications for planning and control.

Kinematics: It has long been known that humans tend to make relatively straight reaching movements, suggesting that reaching movements are primarily under kinematic control of hand position. Are wrist rotations also under kinematic control of the hand? Using a motion capture system, it was found that wrist rotations exhibit a pattern with significantly more path curvature and variability than reaching movements (p ≤ 0.001). While the increased path curvature could lead one to believe that wrist rotations may not be under kinematic control of hand position, this work provides evidence that the curvature is instead due to imperfect peripheral execution.

Dynamics: In order to determine the exact cause of path curvature, an anatomically accurate, mathematical model of the wrist was developed, including recent measurements of passive wrist stiffness. Combining experimentally measured kinematics from human subjects with the wrist model revealed that moderately-sized wrist rotations can be approximated by a very simple model with virtually no loss in accuracy. Interaction torques, for which the nervous system compensates in reaching movements, are present but negligible in wrist rotations. Rather, wrist rotation dynamics are dominated by stiffness, which was shown to be the likely cause of path curvature.