Spotlights

Roxanna Bendixen, Ph.D., OTR/L, examines how disease and disability affect children’s participation in activities, social development and quality of life.

Leading drug dependence and infectious disease epidemiologist William W. Latimer, Ph.D., M.P.H., has been named chair of the department of clinical and health psychology at the University of Florida College of Public Health and Health Professions.

In 2009 when test results on the ailing New York woman who had vacationed in Key West came back positive for the dengue virus, it was the first reported case in Florida since 1934. Dana Focks, Ph.D., a research professor in the department of environmental and global health who develops mathematical models for vector-borne disease, is examining the cause of the outbreak.

Jamie Reilly, Ph.D., is developing treatments that may help patients with progressive language impairments preserve language as the disease advances, helping patients to remember the name of a favorite place or loved one longer.

Inhale... Exhale... Whether we’re awake or asleep, breathing is a function that rarely gets a second thought. But when there’s a break in the respiratory system’s circuit, say with a spinal cord injury, breathing may not be so natural.

There is a common misperception among young people that hookah smoking is cigarettes’ harmless cousin. That’s a troubling notion for public health researchers like Tracey Barnett, Ph.D.

There are currently about 1.1 million people in the United States living with HIV, but the disease was just emerging 20 years ago when Robert Cook, M.D., M.P.H., was in medical school.

When a person experiences a stroke, damage happens quickly. In as little as four minutes, brain cells deprived of oxygen can become injured and die. Rehabilitation researcher Lorie Richards, Ph.D., is studying ways to retrain remaining brain cells to take over for lost motor functions in the hands and arms of people with stroke.

It’s a thorny issue with no easy answer: How do we ensure that all Americans receive health care? Health policy researcher Allyson Hall, Ph.D., and her colleagues are working to understand access issues and find solutions that could help more patients get needed care.

A person’s voice can communicate much about the speaker’s age, emotions, culture, and even health status. Rahul Shrivastav, Ph.D., studies how people derive such information from speech, which could lead to new treatments for speech and voice disorders, as well as result in some commercial applications.