Erika is a PhD graduate from the University of Guelph where she studied sensory inputs in balance and postural control as well as how microvascular blood flow influenced cutaneous mechanoreceptors. She is also a registered kinesiologist and spent over 6 years in clinical practice, implementing education and exercise for falls prevention and chronic disease management. Erika joined the Neurocognition and Mobility lab in April of 2024 as a project manager in order to continue her passions of both clinical work and research innovation. As a project manager, she facilitates, oversees, and manages all research studies in the lab and facilitates collaborations in multi-center studies.
Her responsibilities also include managing ethics applications, supervising and mentoring students, and occasionally conducting data collections. Erika is excited about the opportunity to deepen her knowledge of the relationship between emotion and movement in her current role. Her current research focus includes the multi-center validation study for a novel freezing of gait assessment tool. Some future interests are to examine skin sensory input in Parkinson’s, aiming to target sensory pathways to improve balance and postural control and reduce freezing of gait. In her time outside of the lab, Erika is busy spending time outdoors with her two young kids, coaching girls hockey and gardening.