A Researcher

I thought I'd give you guys a little glimpse into what I do everyday. I'm a graduate student, so most of my day involves "research” (i.e. reading articles, conducting experiments, running simulations, processing data, drawing conclusions, determining data is meaningless, writing about it, going back to reading articles, etc…) My office is downtown at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. I’m lucky enough to have a desk right by the window where I can sit and gaze out onto Lake Michigan pretending to be deep in thought. :-)

The view out our office window is of the lovely Water Purification Plant next to Navy Pier (Navy Pier is blocked by a building). The RIC is that tall greenish building second up from the bottom right. I'm on the 14th floor.

Our lab is called Neuromechanics of Impaired Locomotion. The big scary looking robotic device is a machine used for walking rehab. We use it here for exploring what happens to someone after they’ve had a stroke and what new rehabilitation strategies we can develop to help them walk “normally” again.

It’s sometimes a very monotonous task of coming downtown everyday just to stare at my computer and get relatively little accomplished. But when I sit back and think of the big picture, I remember how blessed I am to be at such an awesome university and hospital working on cutting edge research that will {hopefully} have a big impact on people in the long run.