Leah Karels, a third-year orthotics and prosthetics student and resident at Baylor College of Medicine’s School of Health Professions, is determined to help transform the lives of patients who have mobility impairments.

Karels thought she would become a dentist, but her career plans changed after shadowing orthotic and prosthetic professionals. Like dentistry, she found the biomedical sciences and manual dexterity within orthotics and prosthetics fascinating. The life-changing impact orthotists and prosthetists can have on their patients, such as preventing their loss of independence or lowering the death rate caused by mobility impairments, inspired her to study the profession.

“It feels like I am making a real difference every day,” said Karels, a native of Fargo, North Dakota.

Leah Karels was selected for 2023 Neuromotor Skill Advancement for Post-baccalaureates (NSAP) program at the University of Houston’s Industry–University Cooperative Research Center.

The desire to help patients with disabilities motivated her to apply for the 2023 Neuromotor Skill Advancement for Post-baccalaureates (NSAP) program at the University of Houston’s Industry–University Cooperative Research Center for Building Reliable Advances and Innovations in Neurotechnology (IUCRC BRAIN).

Although Karels’ enrollment in NSAP resulted in a professional leave of absence from the Orthotics and Prosthetics Program at Baylor, she knew the program would help her become a better researcher and professional. “I was really excited to be selected,” she said. “It was a little nerve-wracking to take a leave from school, but I knew it was something that would contribute to my career and that my (clinical) rotations could wait.”

Funded by the National Institutes of Health, NSAP is a 10-week summer program that offers graduate students theoretical and practical learning opportunities in the fields of neurorehabilitation and neuroengineering. During the program, students engage in workshops, trainings, seminars and research projects to learn specialized methods and technology used to study the human brain.

Dr. Stacey Gorniak, associate professor of health and human performance at UH, became Karels’ mentor when she was a student researcher for NSAP. As they studied the relationship between the brain and diabetes, Gorniak said Karels provided invaluable insight. “What I enjoyed most about working with Leah was her ability to look at research from a clinical perspective,” she said.

Collaborating with Gorniak on diabetes and neuroscience research was inspiring and valuable because the topic is understudied and many of Karels’ patients have diabetes. “The coolest opportunity I had at NSAP was working with my mentor,” Karels said. “She’s extremely accomplished. I appreciated her taking the time to explain the research topic to me.”

Medical research often shows diabetes as a disease affecting the body’s hormone systems. However, the disease changes a person’s brain function, Karels said. For instance, cognitive disabilities can cause people with diabetes to have trouble understanding or following a doctor’s treatment plan. This challenge can worsen the disease’s effects on the body.

During the program, Karels collaborated on a research project with Sally Kenworthy, assistant professor of orthotics and prosthetics at Baylor and a doctoral candidate at the University of Houston. The project, “Trailing Limb Angle as a Measure of Propulsion in Older Unimpaired Adults,” determines how trailing limb angle (TLA), the position of the leg as a person moves forward, can predict walking speed, endurance and step length in older adults without mobility impairments.

Karels and Kenworthy focused on a healthy population, unlike most studies examining TLA, to enrich clinical knowledge about how brain disorders affect mobility. They want their research to help orthotic and prosthetic professionals use TLA as a tool to easily diagnose and treat patients who have had strokes and struggle with walking.

Kenworthy’s collaboration with Karels was fun and efficient because their clinical backgrounds made it easy for them to communicate with each other. She also enjoyed having Karels as a teammate because they are typically in a teacher-student setting.

“Leah is incredibly driven and not afraid to step out of her comfort zone,” Kenworthy said. “This means she can adapt quickly to new concepts and environments which will make her an incredible clinician or researcher someday.”

Karels is grateful that Kenworthy invited her to collaborate on the research project because it allowed her to connect the knowledge she learned at Baylor to the study. She found the lab setting intriguing because she could measure the smallest details of how the body moves and learned other factors that affect a person’s walking and how orthoses and prostheses can improve the lives of patients with mobility impairments.

In August 2023, Karels attended the University of Houston’s IUCRC BRAIN Trainee Symposium to participate in a poster presentation. She was one of three students who earned the BRAIN NSAP Student Travel Award for her presentation; she was awarded $1,500 for travel to attend a 2024 regional or national conference where she and Kenworthy will present their research.

“I never pictured myself being a researcher when I started the Orthotics and Prosthetics Program at Baylor, so to have gotten involved in (NSAP) was really out of my comfort zone,” Karels said. “However, it was an honor to get to present something I am passionate about, and to win was a bonus.”

By Jasmine Edmonson, communications associate, Business Operations, in the School of Health Professions