Cayli joined the lab in fall 2021 as a KIN 391 student, and then transitioned into an 8-month co-op position as a Research Assistant. She will be starting her fifth and final year of her bachelor’s degree in Health Sciences come fall 2022. Her research interests include better understanding the symptom of freezing of gait which is a common symptom of Parkinson’s disease, specifically what might help us predict it’s onset.
As a research assistant, she is working on a paper investigating how sensory deficits may be contributing to the development of freezing of gait by analyzing data collected by the Ontario Neurodegenerative Disease Research Initiative (ONDRI). She is also working on a protocol aimed at identifying different walking patterns in those with rapid-eye-movement sleep behavior disorder (iRBD) to predict potential neurodegenerative disease development. She hopes her projects can help advance our understanding of the cause of certain diseases which lead to better, more targeted prevention and rehabilitation programs. She aims to apply to professional school after completing her degree in 2023.