Les chercheurs Postdoctorants Sarah Fraser
| Sarah Fraser |
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Biographie My grandmother broke her hip when walking and talking in her own home. Ultimately, her fall reduced her quality of life and led to many negative outcomes. For me, witnessing my grandmother's rapid decline after a fall resulted in a strong passion for research that can help us prevent or minimize falls that occur because an individual's attention is divided between walking and some other task. As a FQRNT funded postdoctoral fellow working closely with Dr. Bherer, his students, and his collaborators I have been able to develop and participate in many projects within his Cognitive Health and Aging Research Laboratory (www.lesca.ca). In particular, I have been able to use the neuroimaging technique: optical imaging, to non-invasively explore the neural processes involved when individuals are performing two tasks at the same time. In addition, given my interest in improving older adults ability to manage dual tasks, I am collaborating on a large CIHR Mobility study which involves exploring the benefits of both physical and cognitive training. True to my passion, I developed a walking dual-task situation to assess if cognitive and/or physical training improves an older adults' ability to walk and perform a cognitive task at the same time. My current research environment fosters both fundamental and applied research initiatives and as such has allowed me to expand my expertise from behavioral level to the neural level and beyond to applied situations.
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