Research Spotlight

The Multiple Sclerosis Task Force has 21 members and we would like to highlight some of them in this newsletter.

Brooks C. Wingo, PhD is an Associate Professor of Occupational Therapy at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). Her research focuses on lifestyle interventions for management of symptom burden and cardiometabolic risk factors in people with physical disabilities.  Her most recent research efforts have focused on understanding the role of dietary patterns on the cardiometabolic health of adults with spinal cord injury (SCI) and Multiple Sclerosis (MS), as well as adapting evidence-based health promotion interventions for adults with these conditions via telehealth. She is currently conducting clinical trials to explore the impact of diet quality and meal timing in adults with MS. She is also interested in the effects of obesity and weight loss on symptoms and disease progression in adults with MS. 
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Sonya Kim, PhD is a research assistant professor at the New York University School of Medicine where she has a joint appointment in the department of Neurology and the department of Rehabilitation Medicine.  Dr. Kim has examined the ways in which positive emotions in family caregivers play an important role in shaping clinical treatment. Funded by the National MS Society, she developed and validated a personal growth scale in caregiving partners of persons with multiple sclerosis. And she was awarded the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR) under the Switzer Research Fellowship to develop a post-traumatic growth scale in family caregivers of individuals with acquired brain injury.