overview

• Dr. J.C. (Chris) Mizelle holds BS and MA degrees from East Carolina University focused in Exercise Physiology and Biomechanics, and a PhD from the University of Maryland School of Medicine focused in Physical Rehabilitation Science and Neuromotor Control. He received Post-doctoral training at the Georgia Institute of Technology and, after serving as a Veterans Affairs Career Development Awardee at the Atlanta VA Medical Center, he is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Kinesiology at East Carolina University.
  Dr. Mizelle is the director of the Sensory-Motor Integration Lab (SMIL) at ECU. His background is in movement neuroscience, and his current research uses neuroimaging techniques to determine how the brain plans and executes motor behavior. The SMIL is a state of the art motor neuroscience lab, with high-density electroencephalography (EEG) and motion capture capabilities. This hardware is fully supported by advanced computing resources and custom written software.
  One current project in the SMIL is focused on healthy aging. It is well known that aging alters our neurobiology, yet older individuals are capable of performing many of the same tasks as younger individuals. Little is known of how the brain accommodates these age-related changes to allow for the continuation of function, and this is being studied in the SMIL. Similarly, even healthy older adults show deficits in the comprehension of complex actions, such as tool use. How these action representations are stored and recalled in the brain, and how aging changes these representations, is also being studied in the SMIL.
  Limb dominance is another area of research interest for the SMIL. Historically, left-dominant individuals were thought to have a “mirror image” of the neurobiological function seen in right-dominant individuals. For example, right-dominant individuals show activation in the left hemisphere during motor behavior, and it has been assumed that left-dominant individuals would show predominantly right-hemisphere in the same motor task. However, our recent research has shown this is not strictly true; left-dominant individuals show broad activation that is present in both hemispheres. This violates our “mirror image” assumption and is cause to carefully evaluate and compare brain activations in left- and right-dominant individuals during overt motor function and also in cognitive motor tasks. This is a research focus in the SMIL, and has major implications for rehabilitation therapies for those with neurological diseases, such as stroke, and also for those with amputation and subsequent prosthesis use.
  The SMIL also investigates how sensory information is used in the control of motor behavior. It is well known that vision and somatosensation are important for the planning and control of our motor behavior. However, the relative importance of each is not well understood. For example, how are vision and somatosensation dynamically weighted when one becomes less reliable? Our previous research has provided some insight into the brain regions responsible for the shift in reliance from one of the primary sensory modalities to another, and our current work is seeking to extend these findings by building a model of information flow through the brain as sensory input is altered.