Katherine August (Kit) developed her interest and skills in neuroscience and engineering at NJIT under the guidance of her advisor, Dr. Sergei Adamovich, completing her Ph.D. in May, 2009. Kit recently learned that she was awarded the Whitaker International Scholarship enabling her to spend two years pursuing post doctoral research at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich, Switzerland (ETH). The Whitaker Foundation has supported biomedical engineering education and research, and medical research, contributing more than $700 million to universities and medical schools and has supported individual researchers through its prestigious Whitaker International Fellows and Scholars Awards. ETH, or the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich, is a science and technology university ranked among the top universities in the world, and is a founding member of the IDEA League, member of the International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU), and the Top Industrial Managers for Europe network.

The project, neuro-rehabilitation and sensory motor learning in virtual reality: mechanisms, methods, and application, will be a collaboration between Kit from NJIT and experts in rehabilitation engineering from Dr. Robert Riener’s Sensory Motor Systems Laboratory at ETH, Zurich - inventors of Lokomat exoskeleton treadmill application which uses robotics and virtual reality for exercise in spinal cord injury patients with great research acclaim and commercial success.  The ETH group is well known as early innovators, for significant contributions to the field, and for many important publications.

The Whitaker International Scholar experience will increase Kit’s knowledge of biomedical engineering research with a broad cultural latitude consistent with her long term goals and with opportunity to develop a solid foundation for the future. The project goals include establishing an international working relationship between NJIT’s National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research Center (NIDRR), ETH, and research colleagues at UMDNJ including Dr. Alma Merians, Chair of the Department of Rehabilitation and Movement Sciences. The research project in neuro-rehabilitation of limbs in Virtual Environments is relevant to evidence-based methods, the study of aging, motor dysfunction, and disease/condition management in the clinic and in the community for patients with spinal cord or brain injuries, such as stroke, to improve quality of life.  Pictured below are Kit, her dad, Victor August, and Dr. Phyllis Bolling.