The Midwest Roybal Center for Health Promotion and Translation supports the design and testing of principle-driven, potent health promotion interventions that have strong promise of progressing through the NIH Stage Change Model. The Center continues to focus on designing interventions for older racial/ethnic minority adults but expands our focus to include cognitive health. The Center targets four thematic areas of focus to improve cognitive function, namely:

♦  Physical activity engagement and maintenance
♦  Enhancing mobility
♦  Harnessing technology to improve intervention scalability and fidelity
♦  Incorporating mechanisms of action that will sustain behavior change

Finally, the Center incorporates for the first time a Multi-modal ADRD Imaging and Connectomics Core that is enabling investigators to perform brain imaging, interpretation, and storage. The Center also promotes the uniform use across funded pilots of cognitive and physical activity measures from the NIH Toolbox; thereby, enabling the comparison of common outcomes across diverse samples and interventions.

Lakshmi Kannan
Email: lkanna2@uic.edu

Kannan earned her BS in physiotherapy from Padmashree Dr. D.Y. Patil University in India and an MS in rehabilitation sciences from UIC.  Her research interests include dual-task testing and training among people with stroke and older adults.  She is currently working on examining the effects of cognitive-motor training on balance control and cognition with an aim to reduce the risk of falls among older adults with mild cognitive impairment.